(James Grieves) Strategic Human Resource Developme PDF

Strategic Human Resource Development
Strategic Human Resource Development
Jim Grieves
SAGE Publications
London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi
© Jim Grieves 2003
First published 2003
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 The roots of strategic human resource development 5

Introduction: the argument for strategic human resource development 5
Organizational development (OD) 6
Strategic human resource development 8
Early twentieth-century management and social science approaches 9
Scientific management, Fordism and the elimination of uncertainty 13
The problem of control and compliance 15
Organizational analysis as critique 20
Strategic human resource development as critical theory 23
Conclusion 36
Further reading 37
2 Planned strategies for change: the evolution of strategic human resource

development 38
Introduction 38
Organizational design and the management of change in the
twentieth century 40
The excellence movement: the attempt to create permanent innovation
and enterprise 42
Empowerment 46
Strategic downsizing 49
Programmed approaches to change: total quality management, business process
reengineering and teamwork 52
Conclusion 60
Further reading 61
3 Analysing culture 62
Introduction 62
Approaches to analysing culture 64
vi  Contents
Functional analysis 65
The interpretative approach: culture as negotiated meaning 70
The analysis of cultural codes 73
Analysing discourse: speech acts, metaphors and organizational culture 78
Developing organizational cultures 81
Conclusion 89
Further reading 90
4 The emergence of strategic human resource development 91

Introduction 91
Approaches to change 93
The reasons for failed change programmes 98
Change, world competition and the revival of the managerial agenda 100
Critiques of planned change interventions 102
The birth of strategic human resource development 104
Strategic human resource development: the triggers for change 108
Strategic change and learning 112
Four central characteristics of strategic human resource development 115
Conclusion 117
Further reading 119
5 Consultants, clients and change agents 120

Introduction 120
The nature of consultancy 122
Strategic human resource development and the role of the change agent 124
Using diagnostic techniques 128
Turning data into knowledge 132
Conclusion 149
Further reading 150
6 Strategic human resource development interventions 151

Introduction 151
Contracting with the client 154
Becoming an internal consultant 159
Maintaining equilibrium – managing the systems fits 161
The production of meaning: understanding drama 166
Strategic learning 169
Learning and change 171
Conclusion 174
Further reading 174
7 Conclusion 175
Bibliography 178
Index 205
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the various critical debates with managers and
students for their practical focus in relation to affairs of the imagination.
Three people deserve special mention for the insights provided. Both
Trudi Fellows and Joanne Flood each provided excellent examples of change
agent practice and these are illustrated in Chapter 6. Bob Hamlin offered
some very practical advice on the manuscript prior to publication and I am
therefore grateful for his critical insight regarding the relationship between
organizational change and Strategic Human Resource Development.
Finally, special mention goes to Kiren Shoman of Sage to whom I
am grateful for help and advice in guiding the manuscript to its final
conclusion.
Introduction
The subject of Strategic Human Resource Development has emerged as the

logical development of the Organizational Development (OD) tradition.
Strategic Human Resource Development combines three things: (a) an
awareness of the complexities of change management; (b) a desire to rescue
the concept of Human Resource Development from a mundane existence in
the depths of training programmes; and, finally, (c) a new perspective which
provides direction for the twenty-first century. Strategic Human Resource
Development promotes a more enlightened, ethical and skills-focused change
management that puts human resources back where they belong – at the
forefront of the change agenda.
This book represents the fusion of three disciplines – Human Resource
Development (HRD), Organizational Development (OD), and Strategic
Management. Two things might be said about this. First, the demarcation
between disciplines is often arbitrary and constructed for convenience. In
reality, however, the management of organizations requires a more eclectic
approach driven by the pragmatic needs of managers and the organization’s
members.
Second, there has been fusion of these three areas in recent years as
middle managers have become increasingly involved in managing change.
This, in fact, represents the more recent thinking about pro-active change in
contrast to the older planned change approaches.
One major problem with the various debates on Human Resource
Development, Organizational Development and Strategic Management is the
reactive nature of these disciplines to change. This book seeks to draw the
boundaries for a new discipline that views change management as a strategic
process-driven approach that emerges from within the organization rather
than due to the pressures of external forces. It is in this sense that it should be
regarded as pro-active since the purpose is continual transformation of the
organization’s products and services.
The book is informed by the transformation of Organizational Develop-
ment, with its origins in twentieth-century management, to a new terrain in
which learning is placed at the forefront. This is, in part, a challenge to the
2  S t r a t e g i c H u m a n R e s o u rc e D e v e l o p m e n t
reactive formulations of change management we have seen in the past 20

years. However, it also represents a determined effort to challenge the
complacency of managers in the twenty-first century who may think that
manipulative programmes were a product of the past. Change often seems
like a reshuffled pack of cards in which the contents of each hand change but
the form of the game remains the same. Not wishing to be too cynical, it is
nevertheless clear that people still become alienated, stressed and exploited,
by new organizational forms: by employers who use Information Commun-
ications Technologies as mechanisms to control and manipulate or by
companies, such as Marconi or Enron, who fail their own workforce as well
as other stakeholders – shareholders, local communities and even the nation–
state.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Chapter 1, ‘The Roots of Strategic Human Resource Development’, sets the

scene by looking at the roots of the subject in Organizational Development
and organizational theory that goes back to the beginning of the twentieth
century. This history is important in order to remind ourselves of the dangers
of the reductionist thinking in the various value-free ‘scientific’ discourses
that are still available today. It is important, therefore, to promote human-
istic values and adopt a critique that seeks to deconstruct reality prior to
offering an interpretation.
Chapter 2, ‘Planned Strategies for Change: The Evolution of Strategic
Human Resource Development’, focuses on six strategies that were central to
the development of organizational efficiency in the twentieth century. These
are: organizational design, innovation and enterprise, empowerment, stra-
tegic downsizing, programmed approaches such as Total Quality Manage-
ment and Business Process Reengineering, and, finally, teamwork. These
strategies have all influenced our understanding of the management of
change. The strategies mirror the chronological development of late capital-
ism from early twentieth-century monopoly capitalism to twenty-first-
century global capitalism. Furthermore, while these strategies are today
driven by globalization, each contains its own ideology for managing change.
A review of these strategies enables an enlightened move forward into the
twenty-first century.
Chapter 3, ‘Analysing Culture’, argues that if all change strategies
contain contradictions, then the wise change agent will recognize the import-
ance of organizational culture to the objectives of the organization. The
problem, however, is that most populist writing has adopted a functional
analysis which requires the integration of activities and the identification of
dysfunctions. The difficulty with this is the temporary nature of the integra-
tion – if it can be achieved at all – and the fact that the organization’s values
I n t ro d u c t i o n  3
are viewed differently from various positions within the organization. By

contrast, the interpretive approach focuses on the drama and discourse of
organizational life. The interpretive approach therefore provides more
sophisticated insights into organizational behaviour. But, these insights also
have a practical value and are developed further in Chapters 5 and 6.
Chapter 4, ‘The Emergence of Strategic Human Resource Development’,
argues that, by the end of the twentieth century, Organizational Development
had developed a mature perspective for managing change. This perspective
had become more flexible than the planned change programmes of the
1970s. It remained experimental and forward-looking but, above all, influ-
enced by interpretive analyses, it had become much more aware of the
behavioural dynamics that influenced change. There is a problem, however.
As organizations changed by flattening hierarchies, downsized and delayered,
the responsibility for change management was passed on, down the line, to
middle managers, supervisors and team leaders armed with pre-packaged
programmes for managing change at a variety of levels throughout their
organizations. Prescriptive programmes based on half-baked theories, lack-
ing analytical awareness, organizational diagnosis, and methodological
rigour were driven by the myopic vision of a garden pruned and maintained
by managers looking for a quick technical fix. It is in this sense that the case
for Strategic Human Resource Development has now emerged in order to
progress a more enlightened, methodological, and ethical change manage-
ment that puts human resources back where they belong – at the top of the
change agenda.
Chapter 5, ‘Consultants, Clients and Change Agents’, addresses the
‘craft knowledge’ of the change agent. Change agents must focus on the
historical, processual and contextual issues that inform change and develop
an ability to analyse situations, mobilize commitment, and establish mechan-
isms for change. If change is to become a successful learning process, then it
requires internal change agents who are able to develop expertise. In order to
facilitate organizational learning they require a methodology focused on
(a) the role of the change agent within the Strategic Human Resource
Development framework outlined in Chapter 4; and (b) the acquisition of
appropriate knowledge and skills in relation to organizational analysis and
diagnosis. In addition, the various types of Strategic Human Resource
Development interventions require an ability to manage the relationship
between the client and consultant through process consultation. Not only is
it critically important to understand the complexity of dealing with internal
clients but the depth of the intervention also needs to be identified. This ‘craft
knowledge’ also requires knowledge of and an ability to apply four
metaphors – machine, organism, drama and discourse.
Chapter 6, ‘Strategic Human Resource Development Interventions’,
explores examples of change interventions through five case studies. The case
studies demonstrate practical examples of change agents operating within
organizations. The examples are related to the issues developed in Chapter 5.
The case studies reflect (a) the complexities of contracting with the client;
(b) the difficulties faced in becoming an internal consultant; (c) the use of the
organism metaphor to improve processes by examining functional inter-
relationships; (d) the use of the drama metaphor to understand the under-
lying dynamics of organizational life; and (e) the use of discourse as a vehicle
for learning conversations.
Finally, the book provides the basis for a new organizational develop-
ment in which managers become more sensitive to the dynamics of change.
Although the book is a practical guide for managers it should also be read as
a cautionary warning about quick fix solutions to management problems.
The scandal of Enron illustrates this. The unscrupulous management of
change at Enron plunged the company’s stock rating, worth $60 billion, into
bankruptcy virtually overnight. The dramatic bankruptcy registration, on
2 December 2001, saw the company move from seventh on the Fortune list
of US companies into the biggest corporate loss in US history. But, the real
warning here is with the ideas that lay behind the reengineering of Enron by
McKinsey, whose process of ‘atomizing’ was based on the ideas of manage-
ment gurus and certain seminal texts including ‘In Search of Excellence’. The
company’s human resource strategies (the annual hire and fire of MBA
graduates), together with its decision-making and ethical practices (the so
called ‘stock-lock’ which meant that whereas executives with inside informa-
tion could sell shares before the price collapsed, other employees were legally
restricted from selling their share options) failed to focus on personal and
organizational development. Consequently, the quick fix was overtaken by
the doomsday scenario. Without recourse to a process of proactive change
enabled by Strategic Human Resource Development, the simple McKinsey
‘loose-tight’ management model, or the ‘think outside the box’ formula for
success, was not enough to sustain competitive advantage.
The roots of strategic human resource development
1
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Organizational Development (OD)
• Strategic Human Resource Development
• Early twentieth-century management and social science approaches
• Scientific management, Fordism and the elimination of uncertainty
• The problem of control and compliance
• Organizational analysis as critique
• Strategic Human Resource Development as critical theory
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
INTRODUCTION:
THE ARGUMENT FOR STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE
DEVELOPMENT
Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis was a masterpiece of early twentieth-century

film-making. The film’s main theme was workers revolting against exploita-
tion by management. The sub-themes were domination and control by
technology and the construction of what has become referred to today as the
hierarchical stratification of employees represented by senior managers at
the top and an underclass of workers, who have only marginal rights, at the
bottom. As images go, this is one of the most remarkable of the twentieth
century since it was produced in 1927, long before the structural problems
and unintended consequences of Taylorism and Fordism appeared. Indeed,
Metropolis was such a powerful image of soulless machines and new
technology that it was celebrated by the public and reviewers as a warning
about the future. But critics claimed that it contained an anti-Fordist
interpretation of new organizational design and life. They criticized the film
for its implicit rejection of the production line mentality.
This image of the future is still as potent today despite the passage of
time because we are still dealing with the deliberate or unintended con-
sequences of organizational systems, power structures, decisions that affect
the lives of millions of people, not only in the advanced capitalist economies,
but also in the industrializing world of sweatshops and child labour. Organ-
izations such as Marconi and Enron, the champions of the brave new world
of global capitalism, have made bad decisions that affect the lives of too
many people – shareholders, local communities and employees – to suggest
that we have learned from the mistakes of the past.
This book begins from such a position but it seeks to reposition human
resources centre-stage by making them strategic assets rather than costs. This
is not a new argument but, in reviewing the last ten years of the twentieth
century, it is worrying that the trends appear ominous.
This chapter takes its lead from the discipline of Organizational Devel-
opment (OD), partly because it has been incorporated into various other
discipline areas of the management agenda but also because change manage-
ment is now the main subject of academic inquiry within these disciplines.
There is, therefore, a very real danger of misapplying the tacit frameworks
and debates in relation to change. Strategic Human Resource Development
(SHRD) has its roots in OD although it is clear that Human Resource
Management and Performance Management have extended the discourse in
relation to improving organizational performance.
The learning objectives for this chapter are:
1 Twentieth-century management – Functionalism and early industrial
sociology, Behaviourism and the emergence of industrial psychology,
Scientific Management, Fordism and the elimination of uncertainty.
2 The problem of control and compliance – Modernity and the study of
alienation and anomie. The application of technology and the origins of
Organizational Behaviour.
3 Organizational analysis as critique – Strategic Human Resource Devel-
opment as critical theory. Critical theory and the deconstruction of
reality.
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD)
Most OD texts identify the birth of the discipline in the late 1950s with its
flowering in the 1960s (Albrecht, 1983). A thumbnail sketch of the history of
OD would reveal that the 1960s was not only the decade of the T-group
(Argyris, 1962; Harrison, 1963, 1966; Schein and Bennis, 1965) but saw the
introduction of OD ‘technology’ beginning with Lewin’s Force Field Analysis
and the emergence of organizational theory in the form of applied open
systems analyses (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967). The 1970s were defined by
The Roots of SHRD  7
contributions to a ‘theory of practice’ (Harrison, 1970) through intervention

strategies and team development (Kolb et al., 1971) and ‘a proliferation of
training approaches to personal growth and empowerment’ through self-
directed learning (Harrison, 1972). Visioning emerged in the 1980s along
with organization culture, systems thinking, and quality management. The
1990s were the decade of consolidation following downsizing and Business
Process Reengineering. But the ‘greening’ of organizations that began in the
1980s has disseminated the idea of values-driven approaches and organiza-
tional learning (Senge, 1990; Pedler et al., 1991).
The problem with this ‘history’ is not that it is inaccurate but that it
reflects only one, albeit very prominent, psychological/behavioural per-
spective on OD. At the same time an organismic, or systemic, sociological
definition of the subject emerged using an implicit ‘health’ metaphor involv-
ing diagnosis and organizational health monitoring. For example, Beckhard
defined OD as a ‘planned change effort’ involving ‘systematic diagnosis’ of
the ‘total organization’ that is ‘managed from the top’ to increase the
‘organizational effectiveness and health’ of the overall ‘system’ (Beckhard,
1969: 9–10). Such definitions reflected the Functionalist thinking of the time
and it may be argued that this version of OD has come to characterize the
subject more effectively in recent years. It is, however, the often quoted
definition by French and Bell that best characterizes the movement away
from the social engineering approaches, practised largely by psychologists,
who sought to enhance the techno-managerial imperative of the Fordist
period. The approach to managing and developing organizations proposed
by French and Bell emphasized empowerment through the articulation of the
change agent’s values designed to facilitate visioning, organizational learning
and problem-solving in the interests of a collaborative management of
the organization’s culture (French and Bell, 1995: 28). Methodologically we
are moved a little further away from the inherent positivism of earlier
approaches to a humanistic approach that uses Action Research as a mode of
enquiry.
There is a tendency in the literature to assume that the discipline of OD
emerged inevitably from the internal exigencies of the Second World War
production processes and thereafter developed an altruistic concern for
people in organizations. These themes are clearly visible in accounts of the
historical direction of OD as an emerging discipline:
Throughout this century, the efforts of managers to cope with and shape
their environments, through the way they organize and operate their
enterprises, have followed certain identifiable themes. The major theme
during the first third of the century was the attempt, through better ‘human
engineering,’ to rationalize the way work was done; the way the work force
was utilized to increase the output; and the productivity of the goods and
services produced. This theme reached its peak during the Second World
War. After World War II, with the considerably improved human condition,
working men began to demand that the work environment meet some of
their social needs in addition to needs for survival and security. This
impelled management to enter into a major search for a strategy to meet
this new requirement. We saw the emergence, therefore, of a second theme:

the ‘human relations’ approach, where the focus was on man’s social needs
and ways of meeting them to increase motivation and organization pro-
ductivity. This theme continued into the Fifties. In the late Fifties and early
Sixties a new theme emerged for developing people for higher responsibili-
ties. (Beckhard, 1969: 2)
This fascinating interpretation provides a neat linear account of the develop-

ment of OD but it leaves us ignorant of the circumstances that characterize
the delicate tension between control and empowerment that remains the
central theme in managing people and enhancing both individual and
organizational performance. It is much more a desideratum than a critical
discourse since the objective at that time was no doubt to provide a rationale
for OD as a distinct discipline.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT
As organizations have restructured and downsized, employees increasingly

have been required to work in teams. As a result they need to develop new
skills such as decision-making, problem-solving and personal skills which
include listening, resolving conflict, negotiating and leadership. Team effect-
iveness has therefore become a critical issue for the development of the
organization. For this reason, Human Resource Development (HRD) pro-
fessionals are required to develop critical facilitation skills.
As working relationships become increasingly focused on the task,
employees are less frequently required to act as functional managers. Instead,
they operate in a cross-functional manner aided by new technologies in the
pursuit of new knowledge. This pursuit of knowledge has transformed HRD
by minimizing the role of the training department and refocusing on learning.
The emphasis is therefore increasingly on transforming the organization
through personal development and management development.
Another trend has been learning and knowledge management which has
informed the need to understand performance standards in order to deal with
complexity. Feedback has therefore become a necessary condition of organ-
izational learning. As the customer, or client, has been placed centre-stage,
the demands have increased on employees to become acquainted with the
concepts of quality, benchmarking and continuous improvement. This
requires in-house skills and human resources professionals will be increas-
ingly challenged by the need to develop skills of facilitation, action learning,
analysis and critical thinking.
It is therefore the changing nature of work and the political, economic
and social pressures upon organizations that are forcing them to develop and
communicate new corporate strategies; upwardly to develop new human
resource strategies and policies; to involve employees, at all levels, in the
change process; to determine the most effective and efficient work processes;
to build teams with the capacity to learn and become self-managed; and to
FIGURE 1.1
Scientific The root metaphors
Functionalism Behaviourism
management of Organism,
Machine and
Economic Man
derived from early
social science and
Homo management
Organism Man as machine
economicus disciplines
Methodological
Methodological Methodological
assumptions
assumptions assumptions
Positivistic/
Positivistic study Pseudo-science of
functional
of organizations effort and control
analysis of man
develop individuals and encourage management development. However, if

there is one single issue that needs to be encouraged, it is the need to develop
ethical organizations in the pursuit of a better future.
Three central issues, or problematics, which emerged in the first three
decades of the twentieth century informed the later development of OD (and
were still important by the end of the century). These were: (a) the problem
of control and compliance; (b) the application of technology; and (c) the
increasing sophistication of organizational analysis.
EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL

SCIENCE APPROACHES
Organizational Development emerged from three approaches to the study of

organizations, each of which carried certain assumptions about the discovery
of social laws (see Figure 1.1) and their application to the newly emerging
organizations. These approaches were: (a) Functionalist sociology; (b) Behav-
iourist psychology; and (c) Scientific Management. Although all three dis-
ciplines shared common positivistic assumptions, they each differed in their
application.
Functionalism and early industrial sociology
The sociological tradition came to view organizations as organisms in which

the analogy with biological systems provided a useful vehicle for assessing
the needs of the organization. Functionalism was developed by sociologists
to explain social and organizational behaviour and although it can be traced
back to the concerns about social and political upheavals of the Industrial
Revolution, the ‘organismic’ analogy came to prominence with the work of

Emile Durkheim, who incorporated the ideas of Darwinian biology.
Specific assumptions emerged from this form of interpretation:
1 The organization has a life of its own, above and beyond the sum of its
members.
2 The organization is best analysed as a system of functionally inter-
related parts.
3 All organizations have needs which must be met.
4 The act of organizing is based on a consensus about values and goals.
5 That consensus itself emerges as a result of common interests.
The model of a biological organism encouraged a useful but rather one-sided

focus on the sources of social harmony and balance. For example, the
analogy with the human body is useful since it comprises many inter-related
parts which function in harmony for the general health of the whole.
Organizations can therefore be analysed in a similar way to the cells of the
body. They may alter in relation to their changing needs over time or they
may die. Consequently, organizations are considered to have needs and these
can be divided into primary needs and secondary needs. Following Durk-
heim’s argument that sociology should search for ‘social facts’, anthro-
pologists such as Malinowski searched for primary social needs, such as
food, shelter, sex, protection in primitive cultures, and the ways in which
they encouraged secondary needs such as methods of food distribution,
forms of communication, methods of co-operation and control. The early
study of organizations progressed in the same way by explaining how every
aspect of an organization fulfilled some function or other by associating the
primary need (to survive) with secondary needs. This Functionalist inter-
pretation of primary social needs being transformed into secondary social
needs has survived, as the following example by Morgan (1986) in Figure 1.2
illustrates. In this example Morgan has transformed Maslow’s (primary)
needs hierarchy into more sophisticated organizationally based criteria.
If something as complex as a society could be viewed as an organism
with inter-related parts (for example, the economic system which produces
required goods and services; the political system which makes decisions and
allocates resources; the cultural system which provides values for social
integration; the ideological system which provides a rationale for legitimizing
ideas), then organizations could be explained in the same way. The most
sophisticated explanation emerged from the writings of the sociologist
Talcott Parsons who focused on the way social systems establish and
maintain a state of equilibrium.
Because technology is perhaps the most important cause of organiza-
tional change, problems of disequilibrium were explained by reference to
cultural lag, which occurred between the technological system and the
behavioural system. In other words, while employees may accept changes in
technology where they see the benefits, they are less likely to modify their
FIGURE 1.2
Encouragement of complete commitment
Maslow’s hierarchy
Self-actualization The jobs becomes a major expressive
translated into an
dimension of life
organizational
Creation of jobs with sense of achievement and context
Ego autonomy
Needs Work-related sense of identity Source: Morgan
Feedback and recognition for good performance 1986
Organization of work that permits interaction with
Social colleagues
Needs Social and sports facilities
Office and factory parties or outings
Pensions and health care plans

Security Job tenure
Needs Career paths in organizations
Psychological Salaries and wages

Needs Safe and pleasant working environment
norms (attitudes and behaviours), values or beliefs. This may result in a

dysfunction (or cultural lag) in attitudes because the behavioural elements of
the organization’s culture are no longer appropriate to the changes in the
technology. Other factors affecting the rate of change include the perceived
needs of the organization’s members. In this way, organizations were seen to
possess needs of their own which required continuous monitoring for
potential disequilibrium between the system’s parts.
Because the organismic analogy explains social behaviour in terms of the
needs of the organization, it ignores the role of human volition within this
process. For example, organizations are composed of people who make
decisions to which others react. Individual interests coalesce around group
characteristics influenced by meanings, motives, and, sometimes, conflicting,
values. The strength and popularity of Functionalism was its claim to be
scientific by focusing on regularities at an organizational level rather than at
individual or group levels.
Industrial sociology has been refined by a variety of researchers who
shared a common interest with the ‘systems approach’ (see Miller and Rice,
1967). This aspect of organizational development ‘can be traced through the
work of the Tavistock researchers of the early 1950s . . . in particular, the
work of Trist and Bamforth’ and, ‘the work of Joan Woodward and her
colleagues in the late 1950s to the work of Burns and Stalker in the early
1960s and culminating in the Aston Studies of the early to late 1960s (Mills
and Murgatroyd, 1991: 5). This tradition increasingly came to emphasize the
impact of technological structure upon work groups (a good example is
the concept of the socio-technical system (Trist and Bamforth, 1951) and the
effects of technology upon organizational structure (Woodward, 1965; Burns
and Stalker, 1961).
Behaviourism and the emergence of industrial

psychology
Industrial psychology emerged from the equally positivistic school of Beha-

viourist psychology. This sought to apply various psychological techniques to
the selection and training of employees and to the promotion of efficient
working conditions and techniques, as well as individual job satisfaction.
This field of applied psychology first became prominent during the Second
World War, when it became necessary to recruit and train the large number
of new workers who were needed to meet the expanding demands of
industry. Because the selection of employees required the search for ‘special
aptitudes’ and special ‘personality characteristics’ for a particular job, they
became the cause célèbre of industrial psychology. Once the worker had been
selected, s/he was then trained by means of behaviouristic techniques. This,
of course, depended upon the discovery of the most appropriate way of
carrying out a particular job. In this sense, the role of the early industrial
psychologist was to discover the best way to do a particular job with a
minimum of effort. Psychological techniques used included the study of the
activities to do a job and the type of equipment used as well as the
environmental conditions (such as ventilation, heating, lighting and noise
levels) in which the employee works. A good example is the way in which the
Human Relations School moved from a search for technological imperatives
to the discovery of group norms and other behavioural factors that affected
the morale and motivation of the workers.
The work of B.F. Skinner has been the most influential to focus on ‘man
as a machine’. In his books (1953, 1957, 1972) Skinner has given a
functional or causal analysis of behaviour. The objection to investigating
inner mental states is that they are irrelevant in functional analysis:
The practice of looking inside an organism for an explanation of behaviour
has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for
scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism, in its immediate
environment and in its environmental history. They have a physical status
to which the usual techniques of science are adapted, and they make it
possible to explain behaviour as other subjects are explained in
science. (1953: 31)
In Skinner’s Behaviourism change results from selective reinforcement. This

works surprisingly well for some things that relate to physiological needs.
For example, as Mennell states:
by depriving a man of water for a period, or by administering a uretic drug,
we can increase the probability that he will drink a glass of water. His
action can then be explained without reference to his internal state of thirst,
which we cannot directly observe. The causal chain consists of three links:
(a) an operation performed on the organism from without (deprivation of
water); (b) an inner condition (thirst); and (c) a kind of behaviour
(drinking). For the behaviourist, any reference to the middle link is
redundant to parsimonious theory building. (Mennell, 1974: 10)
The major problem here is that human behaviour is more complex and
meaningful than simple examples of physiology. We can, after all, ask people
what they think. A critical objection to Behaviourism came from the linguist
Noam Chomsky (1959), who argued that human language, rather than
observable behaviour, is the essence of the human condition. However, prior
to the later debate forcefully articulated by Chomsky, Behaviouristic tech-
niques were applied to the selection and training of employees during the
Second World War. By the 1950s similar reductionist psychological tech-
niques were being applied to personality tests and inventories which are used
by organizations to select individuals for employment and promotion.
Examples include the Eysenck Personality Inventory, the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator and Cattell’s 16PF and the so-called ‘Big Five’ personality dimen-
sions (tendencies to extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, will to
achieve and openness to experience are designed to reduce complex cognitive
processes to simple prescriptive parameters; see Thompson and McHugh,
1995: 247).
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT, FORDISM AND THE

ELIMINATION OF UNCERTAINTY
Fordism represented, above all, the shock of the new. It represented a new
way of organizing the world through a new type of control over supervision.
Fordism represented standardized products, which were machined to a ‘T’.
Repetition and interchangeability of parts came to shape the twentieth
century. By the end of the twentieth century it was not only production
processes that were characterized by these features. Services, from ham-
burgers to hairdressing, also depend on these features. Both Ford and Taylor
belonged to the tradition of rationalism which was deeply rooted in the
culture of the West, originating with Greek philosophy and gaining scientific
momentum from the writings of Descartes to the present. Rationalists
believed that the human mind could discover the laws that governed the
universe. Fundamental to that belief was the assumption that the discovery of
those laws could lead to limitless material progress. Taylor’s particular
contribution to management theory was in keeping with rationalism in that
he assumed that once a law had been discovered, it was possible to write a
rule for it. This very task, so he thought, eliminated uncertainty. For Taylor,
management should be a science with fixed principles. He thought that
because every company wanted to maximize prosperity, the interests of the
employer and the employee were inseparable. With this ‘unitarist’ perspective
he suggested that workers feared that greater output would result in fewer
jobs. Bad management resulted in workers going slow to protect themselves.
Traditional ways of doing jobs were inefficient.
Taylor’s Quaker background led him to the study of time and motion.
This involved what Braverman (1974) called, ‘the science of other people’s
work’, where he developed his four basic principles of Scientific Manage-
ment. His four principles were:
• the development of a true science of work;

• scientific selection and training;
• bringing together a science of work and the trained man;
• the constant and intimate co-operation of management and men.
His biography also reveals that psychological influences were present in his
home background. For example, his childhood was tormented by recurring
nightmares of imprisonment by a machine.
Standardization was what Taylor excelled at. To create standardized
jobs he found it necessary to observe the operations of workers and make
charts of everything they did. Once all operations were timed, he was able to
impose strict controls on the work process. In future, the system, not man,
would take precedence because of its ability to predict each step in the
production sequence. Frank Gilbreth developed these ideas further. Through
his photographic images, Scientific Management was applied to all aspects of
industrial production. By the end of the twentieth century this very predict-
ability enabled just-in-time flexible employment practices because if it was
possible to predict with accuracy when demand for products and services
peaked and dropped off, then it became possible to hire staff or lay them off
according to the dictates of the supply and demand cycle. This process of
organizing the world to solve problems meant that control became the
underlying principle.
As a result of the incorporation of Scientific Management within the
Fordist work process, however, unfortunate consequences began to emerge.
These included: (a) the separation of brainwork from manual work; (b) the
way in which the invisible system, once it is constructed by experts and
managers, becomes a subtle form of control.
The two major themes of early Organizational Development described
above by Beckhard – ‘human engineering, to rationalize the way work was
done’ and the human relations approach, with its focus on ‘man’s social
needs and ways of meeting them to increase motivation and organization
productivity’ – were heavily influenced by the three root metaphors of
organismic sociology, Behaviouristic psychology and the Fordist/Scientific
Management approaches to the development of organizations.
THE PROBLEM OF CONTROL AND COMPLIANCE
In reality it is impossible to disentangle Organizational Development from

research into organizational behaviour and the latter emerged, by and large,
as a reaction to the ‘rational’, so-called scientific approaches to management.

Although it is easy to identify the attributes of control resulting from
Fordism, Ford himself was simply applying a technique that had its roots in
the development of the Panopticon, and in the Utilitarian philosophy of
Jeremy Bentham in particular:
This identification of factory and prison was, perhaps, quite natural for
Bentham. Prison and factory were united in his philosophical mind by the
utilitarian conceptions of tidiness and efficiency. The root of utilitarianism
– this new mode of conduct which Bentham elaborated – is a passion for
order, and the elaboration of a calculus of incentives which, if administered
in exact measures, would stimulate the individual to the correct degree of
rectitude and work. Utilitarianism provided a new definition of rationality:
not the rule of reason, but the rule of measurement. With it, man himself
could now be regulated. When the rule was applied by the engineer – the
utilitarian par excellence – not only was work broken down in detail, but it
was measured by detail, and paid for in time units defined in metric
quantities. (Bell, 1988: 227)
The rational ‘scientific’ approaches to management that began at the begin-

ning of this century and were informed by such assumptions included:
Taylor’s Scientific Management (Taylor, 1967[1911]); Gilbreth’s motion
studies (Gilbreth, 1911); Gantt’s task scheduling (Gantt, 1974[1921]);
Fayol’s principles of management (Fayol, 1949) and Mary Parker Follett’s
law of the situation (Metcalf and Urwick, 1942). However, it is possible to
put a convincing case that Max Weber, although usually placed with the
Classical School, was sufficiently unique to represent one of the major social
science contributions of his time since his studies not only analysed the
nature of the Modernist period (through studies of bureaucracy) but focused
on the nature of compliance between managers and subordinates. The other
displaced reference points for OD are the problems of alienation associated
with the application of production-line technology and the potential anomic
effects of ‘associational’ rather than traditional ‘communal’ relationships
expressed by Durkheim and Simmel.
Important later contributions to the behavioural science of organiza-
tions included the Human Relations School and the concerns over anomie
and alienation which gave rise to studies of motivation. Thus, although the
seminal Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1966) began to
focus on the role of informal groups in organizations, other theorists such as
Maslow (1965), Hertzberg (1966) and McGregor (1960) began to identify
the study of motivation as a solution to the problem of organizational
control. Others, such as Merton (1968), and Argyris (1957), began to
illuminate the inevitable conflict between bureaucratic organization and
adult personality that had, to a large extent, plagued the thinking of Weber.
Such personality types were said to be characterized by technicism or the red
tape procedures of officialdom. Studies informed by the three root metaphors
discussed above considered dysfunctional or ‘pathological’ personality types
to result from excessive structural over-conformity.
Writers such as Merton (1968) suggested that such inadequacies

involved ‘a trained capacity to become dysfunctional’ because:
1 Bureaucratic structures demand reliability of response and strict

devotion to regulations.
2 Excessive devotion to the rules causes people to lose sight of the
organization’s purpose which is to serve the client or customer.
Thus, the characteristics that lead to efficiency may cause inefficiency in

specific cases. Furthermore, with the passage of time, the original purpose for
the rule-guided procedures may no longer be relevant. Such organizations
may therefore fail to learn or modify their strategic purpose with the passage
of time.
Modernity and the study of alienation and anomie
Modernity is an unusual word because it defines a period of our industrial

past. It defines a distinctive time period when machines became paramount
and the machine culture, informed by futuristic technologies, dominated a
way of thinking. The concept of modernity has affected every walk of life.
Design technology and architecture were instrumental in shaping the future
of modernity by establishing a devotion to a new machine culture which
came to characterize the essence of the twentieth century. In architecture,
Le Corbusier’s ‘house machine’ characterized the ‘modern’ as dynamic,
efficient, progressive and above all designed according to scientific principles
of form and function. The modern movement seemed to herald the greatest
shift in intellectual change in the history of mankind.
The increasingly complex organizations of the twentieth century
required control. This emerged in the form of the machine metaphor. The
ultimate instructive application of the machine metaphor was provided by
Ford’s River Rouge plant in which everything was controlled: every resource,
every machine part and every human movement was subject to the discipline
of machine thinking. Managers became a new breed of decision-makers
required by Taylor’s principles of Scientific Management, and human labour
was engineered to the specifications of the new managers.
The economies of scale created by the development of monopoly
capitalism required systems for controlling the complexity of the industrial
machine. This was aided by the adoption of military thinking and concepts.
Management control and decision-making were characterized by the adop-
tion of military principles (planning, co-ordinating, controlling) and infused
with appropriate language (chain of command, lines of communication,
leadership, strategic management and strategic planning, authority, delega-
tion, management by objectives, operations management and mission
statement).
Complexity had to be planned, organized, controlled and managed with
the precision of a military campaign and managers became the officer corps
of the modern organization and the workers became the troops. Modernity
was characterized by bureaucratic structures, supervisory controls, the sep-
aration of ownership and management, national state regulation, a pre-
dominant manufacturing base and hierarchical knowledge communicated by
a downward flow of information. It also represented a belief in constant
linear industrial progress through well-defined stages of development in
which products were made for a mass market of undifferentiated
consumers.
The central guiding principle of the modern period is that of rationality.
Rational control was already a general principle of scientific method but with
its application to management it gained a new dimension through its focus
on systems, procedures, and regulated human activities. As Max Weber
observed: ‘rational calculation is manifest at every stage. By it the perform-
ance of each individual worker is mathematically measured, each man
becomes a little cog in the machine’ (Mayer, 1956: 127). It is, therefore, no
surprise that Ford’s River Rouge plant was controlled by its Sociological
Department.
The emergence of organizational behaviour and development as a
discipline has its roots planted firmly in the soil of modernity. The ‘scientific’
rationality that emerged ignored the subterranean effects of workers’ atti-
tudes, behaviours and social relationships because the work contract itself
was seen as the new vehicle of enlightened self-interest which was assumed to
be to the benefit of both the workers and employers alike. This can be found
in both Durkheim’s sociology, in which he discusses the new relationship of
‘organic solidarity’, and in the very different concerns of Frederick Winslow
Taylor and his assumptions that employers and workers shared the same
unitary interests.
The study of organizational behaviour and development was a logical
consequence of the application of rationalization. The increasing scale and
complexity of monopoly capitalism required sophisticated administrative
controls. The process of rationalization can be seen as a series of intertwining
processes which include: scientific discovery and the faith in progress result-
ing from the application of the scientific method; the emergence of a
managerial elite with technical expertise and able to apply the newly
emerging management science; a transformation in power relationships
resulting from the rise of the new managerial technocracy. These processes
encouraged an instrumental rationality to workplace relationships resulting
in an unreflective form of social engineering that came to typify behavioural
science. In this way human idiosyncrasies could be subjected to scrutiny so
that organizations could be made increasingly effective by the application of
methods and procedures that measured time and motion, motivation and job
design, leadership and follower behaviours and, finally, socio-emotional
behaviours.
Another characterizing feature of modernity is the nature of workplace
control. The creation of Fordism as a management system and the applica-
tion of ‘scientific’ methods to work behaviours ranged from coercive to
utilitarian. Supervision was essentially formal and hierarchical. The state

controlled and regulated the economy and was used occasionally as a vehicle
of surveillance when industrial disputes affected its interests (examples
include the General Strike, the Miners Strike, Wapping). The role of the state
is to intervene and regulate the relationship between the economy and
corporate organizations in respect of investment, pricing, industrial relations
and wage claims. By contrast, the period from 1980 onwards became
increasingly characterized by a new set of relationships, which will be
discussed later but briefly can be identified by the following:
• the rise of transnational organizations;
• loss of national state influence within the decision-making process;
• the attempt to regulate work behaviours through internal compliance;
• downsizing and the dismantling of bureaucracies;
• the attempt to influence employees’ attitudes by appealing to a unitarist
perspective;
• change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy.
The application of technology and the origins of

organizational behaviour
The roots of Organizational Development are located within the concepts of

alienation and anomie. The modernist era of organizational society was
characterized by its assumptions of progress. It was an era in which the white
heat of technology and the application of rational approaches to organiza-
tional life were to transcend politics, ideology and conflict. This new
organizational enlightenment had developed mass production and consump-
tion and now had to humanize it. The new behavioural science approaches,
including personality and skills testing, were recruited to assist the develop-
ment of a new type of person who would be organizationally committed
(Whyte, 1963) and moulded by the needs of the corporation and whose lives
in the organization were routine and largely unemotional (Biggart, 1989: 4).
Thus, Fordism, Taylorism and bureaucratic management were assumed to
reflect a ‘mature industrial society’ which retrospectively appears more as a
kind of ‘ideology masquerading as science than an accurate description of
social trends’ (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 4).
Modernity represented unlimited linear progress. The social sciences
also adopted the conviction that social laws were discoverable and the early
science of organization was located within the positivist tradition that gave
rise to the concerns over alienation and anomie. For Marx, alienation was a
central problem of industrial society rooted in an exploitative relationship of
power between the factory owner and the wage labourer. However, by the
1950s a significant number of empirical studies, driven by the search for
technological imperatives, reported alienation not as a power relationship
but as hindering the progress of modernity. The most notable example was
the original focus of the Hawthorne experiments on the relationship between
technology (and alienation) and the social relationships (anomie) that led to
effective/ineffective organizational performance. Sociologists such as Blauner
(1966) and psychologists such as Eric Fromm (1963) saw alienation as an
expression of dissatisfaction or lack of fulfilment that emerged as a direct
result of the industrial technology. For such authors, self-estrangement, social
isolation in the workplace, and the inability to identify with the products of
their labour suggested that alienation was a direct result of technology.
Therefore the logic suggested that if the technology was changed, workers
would find the work more interesting and fulfilling. The result for the
employer was likely to be increased efficiency.
If alienation was the term used to describe either the symptoms of
control and exploitation or simply the effects of technology, then anomie
expressed Durkheim’s original concern that modern society and its institu-
tions was displaying signs of disintegration. The concerns about anomic
relationships were transferred to organizational behaviour through the work
of Elton Mayo and the research carried out by the Hawthorne experiments.
Mayo’s assumptions about modern industrial society led him to consider that
the external indicators of anomie were liberalism, with its stress on indi-
vidualism, and the division of labour, required by the Fordist/bureaucratic
approach to management. The ‘discovery’ of group norms in the Western
Electric Company led to the rise of the Human Relations movement, which
began to focus on motivation and leadership. This had unfortunate con-
sequences, according to Reed, who has argued that the effect was to produce
a neutralized and depoliticized reading of alienation (1992: 48). By the 1930s
the concept of the social group became a target for influencing productivity
within the organization but imaginative sociological studies, such as those by
Roethlisberger and Dickson (1966), were beginning to reveal a complex
social world in which the concept of ‘resistance to change’ could not be
viewed as the simple instrumental reaction by employees to management
actions. Some of these early studies are surprisingly refreshing to read today
(Roethlisberger and Dickson and the Hawthorne Studies are good examples
of this) and it is surprising to discover just how sophisticated some of them
were by comparison to writers today who glibly produce quick fix books on
change management and categorize the concept of resistance as if it were a
simple formula of management versus worker. Such studies reveal that
Taylorist principles and the pursuit of efficiency have become the defining
principles by which managers and supervisors come to make moral judge-
ments about employees through arbitrary rules, which carry consequential
sanctions for employees:
This point was illustrated time and again in the Bank Wiring Observation
Room. There it was seen that most of the problems encountered by the
supervisors were problems of inducing the workmen to conform to the
rules of the technical organization. The worker’s conduct was considered
right or wrong in so far as it corresponded to these rules. The supervisor’s
success was evaluated by his superiors in terms of how well he succeeded in
achieving this objective. Theoretically, these rules were supposed to pro-
mote efficiency, and adherence to them was supposed to redound to the
worker’s advantage. From the point of view of the worker’s sentiments,

however, many of them were annoying and seemingly functioned only as
subordinating or differentiating mechanisms.
Consider, for example, the unwritten rule that wiremen should not
help one another wire. This rule received its sanction from the belief that
employees could turn out more work by working only on the equipment to
which they were assigned. There would be less opportunity for talking, less
likelihood of their getting in one another’s way, and less likelihood of their
delaying the solderman and the inspector. There was, in other words, no
logical reason why workmen should want to help one another in this
fashion. To the wiremen, however, this was just another arbitrary rule.
Many of them preferred to work together occasionally. It was one of the
ways in which they expressed their solidarity; it was one of the integrative
mechanisms in their internal organization. Furthermore, they knew that
working together did not necessitate slowing down. In fact, the evidence
showed that sometimes when they were refused the privilege of helping one
another, they became less efficient.
It can be seen that one of the chief sources of constraint in a working
group can be a logic which does not take into account the worker’s
sentiments. Any activity not strictly in accordance with such a logic (and
sometimes this means most forms of social activity) may be judged ‘wrong’.
As a result, such activity can only be indulged in openly within the
protection of an informal group, which, in turn, may become organized in
opposition to the effective purpose of the total organization.
(Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1966: 259)
Such studies make it clear that organizational behaviour needed to search for
the underlying dynamics of the situation by examining the internal logic or
implicit rules of various groups of managers, supervisors and workers. It is
therefore unfortunate that many change management writers lack this
training and characterize the nature of resistance by reference to surface
appearances and egocentric perspectives.
ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS AS CRITIQUE
Organizational Development absorbed the modernist assumptions of scien-

tific reason and progress from organization theory and as it did so it became
a well-defined discipline because it synthesized organismic sociology with
Behaviourist psychology. Figure 1.3 illustrates how, as the twentieth century
progressed and began to unpack the unintended consequences of the mod-
ernist period, the types of interventions made by OD practitioners moved
from a predominantly shallow technical focus in which social engineering
was predominant to the consideration of deeper socio-emotional behaviours.
This history has given rise to various styles of intervention within organiza-
tions ranging from the superficiality of the technocratic to the deeper and
more probing analysis of individual and team behaviours.
Although it never followed the tradition of Scientific Management, the
early focus of OD, on organization-wide change, carried that part of the
The Modern Post-modern FIGURE 1.3

Key characteristics
1900–1935? 1935–1970 1970–2000 of the modern and
Monopoly capitalism Socio-psychological concerns Quality Management the post-modern
Technological determinism with alienation and anomie BPR periods
Application of scientific Hawthorne experiments Empowerment
method to management Discovery of group behaviours Learning organization
Emergence of Fordism, Research into leadership, Corporate governance
Scientific Management and motivation and job design
the Classical School of
management
Control Empowerment
Characterizing features: Characterizing features:

Bureaucratic structure Organic structure
Control is external Control internalized
Separation of ownership and Downsizing and teamwork –
management the global economy
National state regulation Post-industrial, service economy
Manufacturing base Information technology
Hierarchical knowledge Recognition of limits to progress
Constant linear industrial progress creates focus on quality
through well-defined stages Differentiated consumers
Undifferentiated consumers Industrial relations based on
Industrial relations as trench warfare inner compliance
rationalist tradition that informed organizational effectiveness. From Amer-

ica, Lewin’s (1952) model of change provided a linear destination-oriented
journey in keeping with the organismic or health metaphor yet, increasingly,
this model of OD came to represent ‘an episode divorced from the immediate
and more distant context in which it is embedded’ (Pettigrew, 1985: 15).
Thus, the flowering of OD was to some extent hindered by the paradigmatic
constraints of an organizational analysis focusing primarily on organiza-
tional structure, on the one hand, and by the parallel nature of psychologistic
developments on the other. This led to the division, especially in the USA,
into separate areas of study between organization theory and organizational
behaviour (Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991: 5).
Later experiments were illuminating. By contrast to the emerging theory
on organizational structure from both sides of the Atlantic, T-groups repre-
sented the search for authenticity and existential truth in an organizational
world characterized by control and exploitation. But T-groups became what
Roger Harrison called ‘the shadow side of our profession’, because they
challenged personal defences and damaged members through pressure and
attack (Harrison, 1996: 13).
By the 1970s, although there were differences in style, it was reasonable
to assume that OD represented a planned programme involving a holistic,
systemic approach related to the organization’s mission, planned from the
top down and representing a long-term linear effort to change the organiza-
tion through behavioural science interventions and involving collective
action. Thus, OD activities are distinguished from a training course or a

management workshop because, instead of producing knowledge, skill, or
understanding, to individuals, the group or team takes ownership and builds
the connections and follow-up change in organizational development pro-
grammes. The major target of change is the attitude, behaviour and activities
aimed at action programmes (Beckhard, 1969: 15).
By the 1990s organizational learning became a central constituent of
OD because practitioners came to realize that simply by increasing knowl-
edge about an activity does not result in personal and organizational learning
and growth. As Beckhard put it:
One does not learn to play golf or drive a car by getting increased
knowledge about how to play golf or drive a car. Nor can one change one’s
managerial style or strategy through receiving input of new knowledge
alone. It is necessary to examine present behavior, experiment with alter-
natives, and begin to practice modified ways, if change is to occur.
(1969: 16).
As OD developed its approaches in the 1960s, the idea of organizational

health became paramount. Diagnosing the dysfunctions was the key to re-
establishing equilibrium. But this meant that a problem had to be identified
first by someone in a strategic position who ‘really feels the need for change’
and where ‘somebody or something is “hurting” ’ (ibid. 1969: 16). A felt
need was seen as the catalyst to an OD intervention and such needs were said
to form around the pressure to do the following:
1 To change a managerial strategy.

2 To make the organization climate more consistent with both individual
needs and the changing needs of the environment.
3 To change ‘cultural’ norms.
4 To change structure and roles.
5 To improve intergroup collaboration.
6 To open up the communications system.
7 To facilitate better planning.
8 To cope with the problems of merger.
9 To effect a change in motivation of the workforce.
10 To encourage adaptation to a new environment.
Newer forms of organizational analysis increasingly challenged the dom-

inance of structuralist and psychologistic/psychodynamic approaches. The
rise of phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and linguistic analysis had
been particularly influential in other social sciences but OD had been slower
to embrace them since they were not deemed compatible with the dominant
paradigmatic ways of viewing organizations (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). Yet
these perspectives enabled an appreciation of the way employees as actors
view their own organizations.
Thus, interpretative perspectives (Sudnow, 1978; Smircich, 1983) from
the late 1970s onwards, began to make an impact and have enriched our
understanding of just how negotiable, culturally determined and fluid inter-

actions are within organizations. Linda Smircich, for example, in applying
this perspective to the notion of organizational culture, views organizations
as ‘expressive forms, and manifestations of human consciousness’ that are
‘understood and analysed not mainly in economic or material terms, but in
terms of their expressive, ideational, and symbolic aspects’ (1983: 347–8).
Interpretive accounts have enhanced awareness of voluntarist action
within organizations and in so doing clearly distinguish action and sense-
making from structuralist interpretations. Such analyses have challenged
the destination-oriented journey metaphor by applying a process-oriented
model, allowing for the investigation of previously ignored elements of
organizational change dynamics.
More recently, other forms of organizational analysis have been influen-
tial in developing OD as a discipline. Morgan’s (1986) argument that a
variety of metaphors have come to supplement the one-dimensional machine
metaphor that had dominated thinking throughout the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century has had a major impact on thinking. As a result, recogniz-
ing that a more sophisticated diagnostic reading of an organization is
required intellectually challenges OD even further. Such readings, or inter-
pretative judgements, depend upon the insight gained from various root
metaphors that include the machine, the organism, the culture, the brain, and
the political system.
A version of OD that remains rooted in the logic and method to the
1960s’ definitions would reflect an inherent conservatism in its approach to
the subject. The eclecticism thrown up by these newer analyses requires
practitioners to re-examine the history of their subject and recognize that
subjects as diverse as linguistic philosophy and analysis, politics and anthro-
pology, have come to provide a greater depth to the discipline in recent years.
And, in recognizing these newer insights we are paradoxically forced to re-
examine a wider history of the subject than hitherto.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT AS

CRITICAL THEORY
Management education and training emerged as an attempt to inculcate

technical rationality throughout organizations. In a period when manage-
ment was the carrier of reason, progress and modernity this approach to
hierarchical management sought the downward flow of information and
decision-making according to quasi-scientific principles. In contrast to mod-
ernism, postmodern forms of enquiry seek to interrogate organizational
practices from a critical perspective in which the concepts of progress and
rationality are made politically transparent. While the postmodern label has
been applied to a period of history in which organizational society attempts
to reinvent itself by challenging the assumptions of Fordism, postmodernism
as a form of critical discourse has attempted to challenge many of the basic
assumptions that lie behind the rhetoric of the various attempts to bring
change to organizations.
Organizational analysis today should enable the Strategic Human
Resource Development consultant, or change agent, to find clarity in com-
plexity and deal with ambiguity. In Chapter 5 it is argued that skilful
organizational analysis has little to do with the accumulation of facts and
should be more concerned with the relationships between them, that is, with
interpretation and insight. There are two issues here. First, positivistic
enquiry is limited by its inability to explain the relationship between con-
structs of meaning. Second, it is limited by its attempts to be neutral and
value-free. In relation to the first point, because its use of language is not
interrogated, it assumes a misleading scientific method for analysing organ-
izations. This is illustrated by Alvesson and Deetz’s description of leadership
as an example of positivistic enquiry. They point out that the attempt to
provide a universal account of leadership, uninfluenced by context, history
and people’s perceptions, leads it to ‘pull together categorically the behav-
iours, styles, and personalities of quite diverse groups’ such as, ‘university
department chairs, SS officers, US presidents, gang leaders, project managers,
non-violence civil rights spokespersons, and students in experimental groups
that seem to be spontaneously ascribed higher status and/or more influence
than others (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 53). In relation to the second point,
methods that attempt to replicate the objectivity of the natural sciences adopt
a scientifically neutral ability to describe their subject matter by assuming the
truthful representations of their subject’s responses. This brings us to the
problem of respondents’ motives and the researcher’s ability to reveal trans-
parency through questionnaire design and analysis. Attitude scales that
attempt to be universally valid, and these appear to be proliferating in man-
agement studies, provide elegant but invalid interpretations precisely because
definitions are always tied to context, are always historically and politically
defined and are influenced by continually changing shifts in perception.
So far, this defines a critical theory by what it is not rather than by what
it is. A critical theory, then, requires certain criteria to enable it to be critical.
These are: (a) an activity by which information is transformed into meaning
through the process of connoisseurship; (b) a focus that requires a detailed
understanding of social context and historical linkages with particular atten-
tion paid to political processes in the construction of reality; and (c) a critique
which is informed by a humanistic perspective and which seeks to add value
to the organization by developing and delivering strategy through its human
resources.
Alvesson and Deetz point out that there are actually two strands to
critical theory. The first – the critical theorists – belong to a tradition rooted
in German moral philosophy. The second are postmodernists who draw upon
psychoanalytic theory. Thus, while the first draws attention to ideological
critiques about whose interests are being served in a particular situation, the
second focuses on the ‘communicative processes through which ideas are
produced, reproduced and critically examined, especially in decision-making

contexts’ (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000: 89).
While skilful analysis requires both knowledge of ‘conceptual leverage’
(Schatzman and Strauss, 1973: 118) and the ability to apply it, it also
requires the adoption of a values-driven humanistic perspective. The result
might best be described as ‘craft knowledge’ (Ravetz, 1971; Turner,
1988: 116) which can be understood by other members of the Strategic
Human Resource Development community.
Metaphor is seen to be central to the art of analysis and this appears to
be the case in science as well as organizational discourse. In science, for
example, writers such as Koestler (1969) and Kuhn (1970) have discussed
the role of metaphor in the creative imagination of scientists. And, in
organizational analysis Morgan (1980, 1983) is the most popularly cited
author among the many others now taking an interest in the subject by
exploring the metaphorical basis of organization theory.
Reading organizations is like reading a text. This enables managers to
learn how to ‘read’ or analyse their organizations through ‘explanatory’ (that
is, understanding and explaining an organizational problem retrospectively)
and ‘interventionist’ (that is, focusing on a potential course of action)
metaphors (Tsoukas, 1993: 33). Metaphors are also prescriptive because they
are concerned with (a) how to structure or restructure an organization or
part of it (e.g., machine, organism); and (b) identifying existing or preferred
behaviours (e.g., culture, political systems, psychic prison) in order to
improve customer or supplier relationships.
A central tenet of Strategic Human Resource Development is the
promotion of humanistic values. Thus, Cummings and Huse have argued
that, ‘Values have played a key role in OD, and traditional values promoting
trust, collaboration, and openness have recently been supplemented with
values for organizational effectiveness and productivity’ (1989: 38). French
and Bell emphasized empowerment through values designed to facilitate
visioning, organizational learning and problem-solving in the interests of a
collaborative management of the organization’s culture (1990: 28). Tensions
arise, however, between humanistic objectives and organizational needs
resulting in ‘value dilemmas’ and ‘value conflicts’.
The choice and type of intervention
The way the Strategic Human Resource Development consultant deals with
these issues is central to the success of the intervention. For example, one of
the problems with some management consultants is their attempt to elim-
inate resistance to change rather than recognize resistance as a natural and
legitimate human process. By contrast, a Strategic Human Resource Develop-
ment perspective recognizes that resistance needs to be understood and
worked with in order to develop ongoing learning experiences within
organizations. Although the usual references are to process consultation and
26
TABLE 1.1 Types and levels of intervention
S t r a t e g i c H u m a n R e s o u rc e D e v e l o p m e n t
Level of intervention
Type of intervention Individual Team Intergroup Organization Society
Acceptant Counselling designed Dealing with Using catharsis at Taking a diagonal Contractual helping
Enters into a to discharge process, task and the entire group level slice of the relationships
contract with tensions. For maintenance issues, to surface emotions, organization in order facilitated by doctor/
feelings, tensions and example, dealing and group dynamics frustration and to get a clear picture general practitioner,
subjective attitudes with stress, traumas Team building hidden politics which of similarities and priest, teachers,
that often block a T-groups block the effective differences in counsellors
person and make it Personal growth and management of perspective
difficult to function development change
as effectively as he
otherwise might
Catalytic Career-planning and Consultant Adding something Intervention by an National census
By entering a development facilitation for group between two groups. organizational Opinion polls
situation the Goal setting dynamics In this case the ombudsman who is
consultant adds Performance Management by consultant adds a empowered to
something that has appraisal objectives procedure in order bypass normal
the effect of Reward systems Process consultation to find a resolution channels in order to
transforming the to inter-group facilitate a solution
situation, to some problems to the problem.
extent, from what it Today, we can
was consider
organizational
learning and
management
development as
catalysts to change
TABLE 1.1 Types and levels of intervention continued
Level of intervention
Type of intervention Individual Team Intergroup Organization Society
Confrontation Understanding Exploration of half- The consultant brings Culture change Government
The consultant alternative contradictions and two or more groups Challenging strategies Educational system
actively intrudes, perspectives discrepancies together with the and conventions of University
usually at the request Eliminating conflict Inter-action analysis intention of gaining a performance Legal system
of different parties in and contradiction of inter-personal shared and realistic
the dispute, into the behaviour perspective
organizational
experience in order to
challenge assumptions
and paradigms
Prescriptive Behaviour Team briefing A third party arbiter External diagnosis Pressure groups
This is the most modification Circulars, memos, whose decision is Organizational Investigative
forceful type of agendas, and other binding on both redesign journalists
intervention. Tends to various rules that parties Down-sizing Newspaper’s
be widely applied by prescribe the conduct Business process editorial policy
outside consultants of the team re-engineering Opinion shapers
The Roots of SHRD

who are seen as Mergers and
‘experts’ rather than acquisitions
facilitators
Principles, models and Transactional analysis Diagnosis and Grid Organization Models used by top Bill of rights
theories McGregor’s Theory X feedback of behaviour Development – based team to redesign Separation of powers
The intervention is and Theory Y and processes are on theory is of inter- company strategies Rule of law
informed heavily by formed by a theory group conflict and co- and values
the concept and ideas and models – for operation. The
that have been example, Bales’ socio- purpose is to
identified clearly in the emotional process transform current

literature interaction experience with the
use of new ideas
27
Source: Modified from Blake and Mouton, 1972.
psychodynamics, critical perspectives have also made an impact on the

client–consultant relationship. As Boyce has pointed out:
A vast literature spanning sociology, philosophy, social criticism, education,
and organization studies now exists that advocates a critical perspective
(Bowles, 1989; Burrell, 1988; Calas and Smircich, 1992; Clegg, 1990;
Ferguson, 1984; Freire, 1985; Giroux, 1992, 1993; Gramsci, 1971; Martin,
1990, 1992; Mills, 1988; Mills and Tancred, 1992; Tierney, 1989, 1993).
Some of this work is grounded in modernism and some in postmodernism.
Giroux (1993) and Tierney (1993) proposed a blend of these approaches,
‘critical postmodernism’, which addresses structures and expressions of
oppression at both macro and micro levels. Central to a critical perspective
is identifying and challenging the assumptions that lie underneath one’s
work. Taking a critical perspective involves a ruthless and courageous
examination and deconstruction of assumptions, norms, expectations,
limitations, language, results, and applications of one’s work. (1996: 6)
An example of why interventions need to be considered carefully by the

Strategic Human Resource Development consultant is provided by Blake and
Mouton (1972). In their Strategies of Consultation they identify five types of
intervention (Acceptant; Catalytic; Confrontation; Prescriptive; Principles
models and theories) that may be applied at five levels (Individual; Team;
Inter-group; Organization; Society). The important point about this schema
is that it forces the consultant to think carefully about the purpose of the
intervention (see Table 1.1). The failure to reflect on the motives for the
intervention and values that lie behind it will result in methodological
problems. While each type of intervention strategy will be agreed with the
client system, the choice of intervention will reflect a carefully considered
diagnostic position.
There is another reason for thinking very clearly about the type of
intervention strategy to be applied. This is described by Roger Harrison in
his paper ‘Choosing the depth of organizational intervention’. For Harrison,
intervention strategies range from deep to surface level. As he states, ‘the
deeper we intervene, the more we impact core values and self-concepts’
(Harrison, 1996: 30). Deep interventions are those that are due to emotional
involvement. These require a high level of behavioural knowledge and skill
as well as a sensitivity to the client's needs. Furthermore, there are clearly
ethical issues which require the willing participation of the client. This is
what Blake and Mouton call acceptant intervention strategies. The deepest
levels require that ‘the target of change is the individual’s inner life’ when, ‘if
the intervention is successful, the permanence of individual change should be
greatest’. There are, Harrison argues, dramatic reports of life changes as a
result of personal development ‘in which persons have changed their careers
and life goals as a result of such interventions, and the persistence of such
change appears to be relatively high’ (1996: 19). What makes deep inter-
ventions difficult is that the information required becomes more personal,
complex and effectively ‘less available’. This means that at the deepest levels,
the consultant must use more skill and time to uncover information which is
hidden, either deliberately or subliminally, by the client. By contrast, surface
level interventions, as for example in performance management, normally

mean that information is collected through records and quality control
systems.
The choice of intervention, for Harrison, depends on a number of
factors. These include the following:
1 The degree to which the client is dependent on the competence of the

change agent.
2 The extent to which it is necessary to move beyond surface level
interventions (and procedures, policies, and practices of the organiza-
tion) to consider more instrumental behavioural factors such as group
norms which ultimately influence the operational performance of the
organization’s strategy and modus operandi.
3 The degree of risk to the client’s own value system and personal
constructs.
Change events or change processes?
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived in the sixth century BC, argued
that ‘everything is flux’ by which he meant that opposites, or contradictions
have unity. In simple terms this means that argument, contradiction or
conflicts of interest should not be avoided since that is how change occurs. It
was, for Heraclitus, the very substance of the world. In reality while the
world may be perceived as relatively permanent, it is, in fact, always in a
state of flux. The stability of objects or ‘things’ is a fiction because they are
like the flames of a fire: they look like objects but they are actually processes.
This idea was developed further by Hegel in the early nineteenth century who
argued that change is nearly always intelligible. Every complex situation
contains conflicting elements within itself. For Hegel, change was always
destabilizing. No situation could continue indefinitely. All conflicts must
work themselves out until there is a resolution. But this, in turn will bring
about a new situation with all the accompanying dynamics for change again.
Hegel’s dialectic, or law of change, was made up of (a) the initial stage: the
idea or event; (b) the reaction provoked by the initial stage and the
conflicting elements that comprise the reaction; (c) the synthesis of the two
previous stages which also contains the seeds of new conflict. We can
therefore draw the following modest conclusions in relation to organiza-
tional change.
For change to be organizationally interesting it must do one of the
following:
1 Indicate significant transformations in social behaviour, attitudes or

regular ways of doing things.
2 Illustrate modifications to patterns of activities, routines or processes.
A more interesting way to think about this is that change is often seen as a
series of events, stages, or histories as individuals, groups and organizations
transform themselves. But, in reality, this is an illusion in exactly the same
way that a historical narrative can give the impression that historical change
is like a singular story (the one told by the historian) by ignoring the
perspectives or active processes of the actors themselves. In both cases what
is misunderstood is that change is much more complex and results from a
series of processes which interweave their causality in the same way that a
net represents a non-linear flow of information.
Although they are the real motives for change, they are not neutral.
Processes are constrained by and also transform the three structures that give
form to a seemingly complex reality. These three structures are political,
economic and social (see Figure 1.4). Furthermore, while these structures are
not rigid, they do have a degree of longevity which makes them appear
permanent. In time, of course, the processes which make them cause the
structures to be contested and perhaps renegotiated. Organizational change
is not, therefore, simply a series of ebbs and flows as they might be described
by chaos theory in natural science. These structures represent interests that
come into conflict.
A critical theory assumes, then, that there are inevitable clashes of
interest in organizations, which are essentially derived from opposing struc-
tural (for example, managers/employees, capital/labour) positions. This
inevitably means taking care when identifying who the client is (Schein,
1997b).
Taking a critical perspective, according to Alvesson and Willmott, is to
adopt an approach that understands management as a political, cultural and
ideological phenomenon (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992: 8). The role of
critique, therefore, is equated with the adoption of a reflective attitude ‘based
on asking questions that focus on the influence of the ubiquitous capitalist
discourse’ and on a critical theory in postmodernity that does not present
clear-cut answers, but works towards ‘ensuring that the questions that relate
to capitalism as a discourse are still being asked’ (Grice and Humphries,
1997).
Essentially a critical theory is any position that provides a critique but
objects to a positivistic approach. A good example of this is the emergence of
organizational culture as a metaphor for organizational analysis, diagnosis
and development. The problem, however, is that it was hijacked by positivists
who saw it as another variable to be manipulated rather than an analytic tool
or approach. White and Jaques have discussed this:
In the late 1970s, it seemed possible that the concept of organizational

culture as a new metaphor for understanding social systems might chal-
lenge theorists to contextualize more cautiously the benefits and limits of
research modelled on the physical sciences by introducing more interpretive
models of inquiry from anthropology and sociology. Very quickly, however,
Strategy Staff Style Structure Values
Globalization
Constraints or Nature of
Legislation Centralisation
opportunities leadership Ethical
Political Vision vs
for behavioural and position
Management decentralisation
performance supervision
Ownership
Markets
Shareholder
Finanacial institutions Wage/ Pro-active
value Control
Economic Mission effort or
or systems
Competition bargain reactive
stakeholders
Suppliers
Standards Selection,
Expert
Hours worked Policies, Nature of recruitment, Closed or
or
Social procedures, psychological training, open
The Roots of SHRD

socio-technical
Knowledge and skill actions contract promotion, relationships
systems
Number of employees security
FIGURE 1.4
The political, economic and social structures and the processes they influence

31
culture began to be absorbed into mainstream theorizing as simply a new

‘variable’, and its critical potential was seriously diluted or entirely lost
(Barley et al., 1988). As early as 1980, Morgan and Smircich (1980)
warned of this trend. Smircich (1983) attempted to distinguish between
approaches treating culture as a ‘variable’ and those treating culture as a
‘root metaphor’. For the former, culture was simply one more attribute of
organizations to be studied using the dominant methods of physical science
inquiry. For the latter, culture was something an organization was, an entity
not well represented by reductionistic, measurement-centred, hypothesis-
testing methods. To conceive of organizations as cultures raised issues of
epistemology and social values as well as issues of method. Post-modern
theory has been criticized by critical theorists because of its lack of
attention to values. (White and Jaques, 1995: 45–60).
The discredited but still dominant functionalist theory placed the culture
variable centre-stage, resulting in the loss of its potential for critical debate
(Calas and Smircich, 1992; White and Jaques, 1995). Furthermore, in
addition to the assumed ‘neutrality’ of positivism, various topics have
become sanitized by the often deliberate removal of their critiques by
management consultants who have been responsible for shaping the popular
management agenda. As Collins points out, management consultants have
played a dual role between providing apparent solutions to problems on the
one hand, while on the other plundering the literature and removing the
critiques in order to develop their ‘booty’ of techniques and approaches.
Management consultants have become the soothsayers of the modern world
charged with near collusion on the one hand and undermining the confidence
of managers: ‘Hand-in-hand (or perhaps more accurately, hand-in-glove)
with the state, management consultants have played a key role in all this;
simultaneously bolstering and demolishing management confidence and
managerial careers’ (Collins, 1997: 23).
Consultants, therefore occupy a privileged position since they create
dependency by defining themselves as experts and simultaneously provide
templates, recipes and formulae for the organization to follow. The dangers
of over-reliance on expert solutions and pre-packaged approaches (discussed
in Chapter 5) can lead to the application of simplistic ideas to complex
problems that really need to be diagnosed carefully:
Equally, we could argue that in developing novel solutions to management

problems (and in ensuring appropriate rates of product development),
consultants have reshaped management thinking, to some degree, by
fostering an eclectic approach to management; an approach which happily
plunders a range of social scientific disciplines and subject areas. For
example consultants have borrowed from areas such as sociology, social
anthropology, political philosophy and have acquired such booty as quality
circles, autonomous work groups, the concepts of organizational culture
and cultural change management, and most recently the notion of worker
empowerment. (ibid.: 1997: 23)
Empowerment is another topic that, as Collins suggests, has been removed of

its critical scrutiny by many HRM practitioners in the UK by promoting
empowerment as a form of individual commitment to the organization and
by playing down the political motives behind a preference for individualism
rather than collectivism. Thus, the recent political history of the UK (two
major recessions, large-scale unemployment, continued structural changes
replacing Britain’s manufacturing base by foreign corporations and fostered
by government policy, the growth in the service sector, the emergence of the
flexible firm and the emergence of core and peripheral workers, the challenge
to trades union practices by powerful employers and a resultant decline in
trade union membership and continual economic turbulence and restructur-
ing) in shaping the British model of HRM is often conveniently ignored. For
example Pateman (1983) has argued that the narrow focus of HRM in the
UK is essentially about job participation and involvement rather than co-
participation and ‘a real commitment to allowing workers a democratic voice
in the processes of decision making such as that promoted by the Organiza-
tion Development Institute (1992)’. This is essentially an argument made by
Collins (1997) who states that those committed to empowerment seem to
face two key issues which appear to pose critical questions that test the value
system of OD:
On the one hand empowering initiatives . . . have been demonstrated often
to be initiatives which in denying workers access to frameworks of power,
or access to traditional institutions for decision making (such as trade
unions), work towards enhancing managerial control over the labour
process. Yet on the other hand, it seems that if we simply set about
reversing this process (and reversing the trajectory of contemporary
politico-economic developments) so that workers operate under a rather
more mutual system of decision making – a system less influenced by the
operation of management power deployed unilaterally – there would
remain the problem that we may, in fact, have done little to democratize the
workplace in line with the values of the OD Institute. Under this particular
model of empowerment groups such as women, ethnic minorities, older
workers or the disabled would tend to remain as dependent and disen-
franchised subjects since they would have no real voice of their own to
represent their own distinctive needs, drives and orientations. (ibid.: 26)
The extent to which HRM has changed managerial practices has been
critically discussed by various authors, many of whom have raised questions
about the gap between rhetoric and reality (Keenoy, 1990; Bowles and
Coates, 1993). Commenting on what academic researchers can do about this
process, Watson, by implication, suggests that the act of reflection is a critical
tool in the art of intervention:
Social science writing generally and management thought particularly is
involved in a double hermeneutic. Researchers are not engaged in a one-
way process of interpreting the actions of those they study. They are in turn
interpreted by their ‘subjects’, who may be influenced by them. Writers on
HRM are not invisible observers behind a two-way mirror. Their utterances
may instead act as mirrors in which their subjects examine themselves and
reflect on their practices. And these people may act in the light of the image
they observe. (Watson, 1995: 7–8).
The solution is to reposition the place of expertise back in the organization.

To develop the role of the internal change agent not only addresses the
frameworks of power, it develops the idea of devolved decision-making. In
place of recipes and pre-packaged solutions to change, the change agents
should engage in a discursive practice when they address their own organiza-
tional problems.
Critical theory and the deconstruction of reality

Change management is usually equated with progress and improvement.
This perspective tends to assume that instability is the norm and, as the rate
of change increases, employees are often consulted over coping strategies.
One problem with this received wisdom is the assumption that change
related to globalization is natural, inevitable and progressive. Occasionally,
however, critical accounts emerge to challenge this assumption. One example
is Steingard and Fitzgibbons (1995) who deconstruct what they call ‘the four
myths of globalization’. In order to do this they employ Derrida’s (1967)
method of deconstruction which depends upon a structural analysis of
opposing linguistic constructs (man/woman, day/night, good/bad, etc.).
Thus, in order to ‘unpack the subterfuge of globalization’ deconstruction
enables the possibility of identifying the underlying assumptions.
In this way, the tendency of discourse to naturalize the process of
globalization is deconstructed by showing the artificiality of the ordinary and
taken-for-granted structures of social thought. As they point out, ‘the
underlying assumption of deconstruction is that language is far from a value-
free component of human communication; language plays a considerable
role in constituting the power relations of social reality’ (Steingard and
Fitzgibbons, 1995: 33). Such an analysis of the language of globalization
reveals a grand narrative masquerading as neutral scientific and industrial
progress along with advances in technology which become available to the
world despite differences in wealth or other social barriers. Thus, the
language of development is characterized by its assumed opposite – under-
development. By viewing ‘under-developed’ countries as aspiring to devel-
oped status the associated processes of ‘improvement’, ‘growth’ and
‘progress’ are naturalized.
In their account, myth 1 – globalization – assumes the need to move to
a singular ‘healthy’ and ‘harmonious global culture’. Seen this way global-
ization is benevolent in its attempt to construct a homogenized world of
uniform products. As a result, they argue that globalization, ‘as a force in
modernity’s quest for progress, is sterilizing and silencing the variegated
cultures around the planet’ (ibid.: 33):
The homogenization of the world is being facilitated by the standardization
of life made possible through the introduction of computers and tele-
communications technology. The planetary adoption of the free-market
mentality is engendered by the ‘global village’ phenomenon outlined by

McLuhan (1964). Through satellite communications, the Internet, fibre
optics, the fax, digital information transaction, and high speed computers,
people around the world are practically neighbours. The values of global-
ization, transmitted through satellite television and the distribution of
worldwide publications, permeate everyone’s life. Global marketing, inter-
national stock markets, and the availability of nomadic worldwide venture
capital complete the scene for the rise of a global market value system. No
culture is protected by topography, tradition or just plain disinterest –
essentially nobody is out of reach of the extended arm of globalization.
(ibid.: 34)
Myth 2 – that globalization brings prosperity to person and planet – ignores

the dichotomies of social class, gender, ethnicity and power. This is a cyclical,
resource-hungry political and economic system that strives relentlessly for
‘global free-market expansionism, consumerism, and the continuous search
and manufacture of new markets’, this in turn ‘leads to the continuous quest
for more – more resources, more labour, more needs, more markets’. The
twenty-first century is therefore characterized by ‘expansion’ and ‘progress’
but it is clearly not a neutral project:
Most American business free-market expansionist projects do not help

other nations start economic initiatives, or preserve, in any meaningful way,
their indigenous cultures. They accelerate the transformation of the local
culture to an Americanized outpost while making them subservient to the
economic and technological system which has been imposed on them. Not
only is the American free-market hazardous to the cultural wellbeing of the
host country, but it is also detrimental to America itself. The American
worker, unemployed by the closing of hundreds of manufacturing plants,
now becomes a financial burden to the taxpayers through the need for
social support payments. This increases the federal budget, making free-
market expansionism even more vital to US economic survival. Thus, the
downward spiral continues. (ibid.: 35)
Myth 3 – that the global market spreads naturally – is deconstructed through

commentaries of popular magazines, books, newspapers and television
accounts. These newsworthy accounts report what are presented as inevit-
able ‘facts’ devoid of interpretation. By contrast, Steingard and Fitzgibbons
claim that such constructs are ideological: ‘We somehow have embraced the
distorted ideology that globalization is a natural process or phenomenon
which is just happening. Moreover, we have decided to reorient our entire
educational, commercial, cultural and governmental systems to accord with
its principles’ (ibid.: 36).
Myth 4 – that the account of globalization provided by contemporary
management literature presents a value-free representation of its subject – is,
in reality, not informed by critical scrutiny but by the desire to sell a
commodity of packaged conventional wisdom:
Over the last several years, the fields of management and organizational
behaviour have become concerned, some would say obsessed, with global-
ization. The expansion of democracy and the free-market system on a
worldwide basis has called for a radical change in the nature of manage-
ment and organizational behaviour education and training. Textbooks,
courses, and even degrees are offered in areas like ‘international manage-
ment’, ‘cross-cultural business management’, ‘transnational organizations’,
and ‘marketing in third world countries’. Sweeping globalization has hit the
management educator and the business school. Contemporary organiza-
tional behaviour and management textbooks are dedicated increasingly to
globalization concerns . . . These textbooks offer almost no critical thought
as to the origins, moral impact, or cultural considerations connected with
the importation to and imposition of globalization on other countries and
cultures. (ibid.: 36)
CONCLUSION
Strategic Human Resource Development has the ability to challenge the

naı̈veté of its value-free ‘scientific’ past by promoting humanistic values and
by adopting a critical discourse to organizational analysis. Nevertheless,
there are clearly tensions and strains between human benefits and organiza-
tion performance resulting in ‘value dilemmas’ and ‘value conflicts’.
The pressures for organizational change reveal themselves through
‘increased work targets, threats of job loss, job responsibilities, shifts in the
balance of power, and general upheavals that are all features of today’s work
environment’ and all of which constitute sources of job stress (McHugh,
1997). Consultants and change agents working from an understanding of
critical debates in social constructionist theory and postmodern discourse are
able to ‘negotiate’ the subjective meanings of these wider historical frame-
works by interrogating the complexity of many simplistic accounts in the
management literature.
Since people’s lives are heavily influenced by their sense-making stories,
clients are often helped by looking at themselves and their organizations by
locating their problem-focused accounts within a wider framework of mean-
ings and understandings. Drawing extensively on the work of Foucault,
White (1991) argues that individuals often find themselves in untenable
positions because they have unwittingly succumbed to power-laden cat-
egories used in societal discourse (Barry, 1997). Labelling theory, for exam-
ple, has shown that people often come to internalize the definition of self
(although not always in the way intended by the labeller). Thus, ‘having been
labelled “schizophrenic”, “obsessive”, and “neurotic” by various experts’
people often ‘proceed to construct themselves accordingly’ and consequently
they become ‘problematized’ (Barry, 1997). This is the new challenge but it is
up to Strategic Human Resource Development practitioners to mark out
their terrain and rise to the challenge.
FURTHER READING
Reed (1992) provides a clear exposition of the basic theoretical debates that
informed twentieth-century management. His treatment of core concepts
such as rationality, alienation, anomie and power illustrate the theoretical,
methodological and ideological assumptions that lay behind early twentieth-
century analysis of organizations. The OD tradition described by Beckhard
(1969) is a useful starting point for the reader interested in how the subject
came to be defined. A more recent sophisticated account of organizational
change and development by Hamlin et al. (2001) is recommended to bring
the reader up to date with both academic and practitioner debates.
Although not explicitly stated, the idea that organizational analysis should
perform a critical function in the debate about organizations is provided by
Alvesson and Deetz (2000).
2 Planned strategies for change: the evolution
of strategic human resource development
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Organizational design and the management of change in the twentieth
century
• The Excellence Movement: the attempt to create permanent innovation
and enterprise
• Empowerment
• Strategic downsizing
• Programmed approaches to change: Total Quality Management, Busi-
ness Process Reengineering and teamwork
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
This chapter focuses on six strategies that became central to the development
of organizational efficiency in the twentieth century. These strategies –
organizational design, innovation and enterprise, empowerment, strategic
downsizing, TQM and BPR, and teamwork – are identified as precursors to
our understanding of the management of change in the twenty-first century.
These strategies have transformed our thinking about management from the
early twentieth-century blueprint promoted by the Classical School. While
the major political driver has been the process of globalization, it has to be
recognized that each strategy contains its own ideology for managing change.
A central argument is that all change contains its own contradictions and
these strategies for change are no exception.
Planned Strategies for Change  39
1 Organizational design which discusses the emergence of bureaucratic

procedures and their application to the Fordist production process. The
attempt to dismantle bureaucracy is attributed to the Excellence Move-
ment which sought to redesign organizations as flexible structures
driven by core values and leadership in the pursuit of excellence.
2 The strategy of the Excellence Movement which focuses on the attempt
to create permanent innovation and enterprise, in organizations that
were no longer defined by bureaucratic rules and regulations and where
leaders replaced managers, and employees became empowered to meet
the needs of increasingly sophisticated customers.
3 The strategy of empowerment, which is noteworthy in not only attempt-
ing to extend the arguments of the Excellence Movement but in seeking
to solve the problems of alienation. Strategies to achieve empowerment
may include redefining the nature of supervision or management;
reward systems, job design; or even changing the nature of the working
environment. The critical determinant, however, is the ability to take
control of one’s own work situation.
4 The fourth strategy, downsizing, was originally developed as a corporate
strategy for changing an organization’s structure in order to enhance
competitive advantage. This was also a tactic driven by the global
marketplace. In the attempt to move production-based organizations
from high volume goods with low profit margins to niche markets
providing high profit margins, downsizing appeared to be inevitable but
the strategy came to contradict the very idea that people were resources
rather than costs.
5 The fifth strategy – Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business
Process Reengineering (BPR) – is distinctive enough. While each
approach to quality improvement has its own literature and advocates,
they all, nevertheless, share the same objectives in seeking an holistic
business improvement through a programmed approach to change. Both
TQM and BPR sought to achieve quality enhancement through a top-
down process of planned strategic change by borrowing fragments from
the Organizational Development literature. But each relied, unlike OD,
on the expertise of the advocate rather than the joint diagnostic
relationship between facilitator and client.
6 The final strategy for change is teamwork. Teamwork became one of the
fundamental approaches of contemporary management because it
offered important positive advantages for organizational development.
Yet it was not until the neo-Human Relations theories of the Excellence
Movement and TQM that teamwork was adopted as a technique
designed to overcome the damaging consequences of the separation of
mental and manual labour. If teamwork was a valuable OD technique, it
was unfortunately also exploited in the attempt to downsize and delayer
the organization.
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND THE MANAGEMENT OF

CHANGE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Managing change in the early twentieth century was concerned with organi-
zational design. The progressive image for the design of twentieth-century
organizations was encapsulated in the metaphor of the machine. This was
contrasted with the earlier nineteenth-century image of the wheel:
Over the literature of work in the nineteenth century broods one image
above all – that of the Wheel. We find it already in the description of
alienation in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of 1795:
‘enjoyment is separated from labour, the means from the end, exertion from
recompense. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole,
man fashions himself only as a fragment; ever hearing only the monotonous
whirl of the wheel which he turns, he never develops the harmony of his
being, and, instead of shaping the humanity that lies in his nature, he
becomes a mere imprint of his occupation, his science’. (Meakin,
1976: 19)
By contrast to the image of the wheel, the machine was the image of progress
for the twentieth century. Through it, change was seen as positive and
forward-looking. This image was consistently contrasted with the negative
and pre-industrial organic forms of work and life. The old anti-culture of the
organic pre-industrial communities was viewed as a barrier to change that
had to be overcome by its destruction (ibid.: 3).
Modern organizations were seen as the social inventions above all
others. They came to be defined as social units (or human groupings) that
were deliberately constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals. These
were either profit maximization or public accountability. Twentieth-century
organizations therefore came to be characterized by:
1 Divisions of labor, power, and communication responsibilities, divisions

which are not random or traditionally patterned, but deliberately
planned to enhance the realization of specific goals.
2 The presence of one or more power centers which control the concerted
efforts of the organization and direct them toward its goals; these power
centers also must review continuously the organization’s performance
and re-pattern its structure, where necessary, to increase its efficiency.
3 Substitution of personnel, i.e., unsatisfactory persons can be removed
and others assigned their tasks. The organization can also recombine its
personnel through transfer and promotion. (Etzioni, 1964: 3)
Modern organizations were consistently defined as rational because they

were much more in control of their nature and destiny than any other social
grouping had been throughout history. Bureaucracy became a synonym for
modern organizational change. This change focused on producing the
following:
1 Standardized products.
2 Interchangeable parts and people.
3 Routinized work processes.
4 Impersonal work relationships.
In the first half of the twentieth century the pacesetters of modernity were
‘big business and industry, big government, massive armed forces, and, in
recent years, big labor’ (Charles Page, in the Foreword to Peter Blau’s
Bureaucracy in Modern Society, 1965). These new organizations resulted
from, and in turn stimulated, the ‘unprecedented growth in modern society
of large-scale formal organisations within which must be developed hierar-
chical administrative and operating social machinery, if their tasks are to be
achieved’ (Page on Blau, 1965).
As we noted in the previous chapter, some social scientists became
‘social technicians’ preoccupied with organizational improvement and effi-
ciency, on the one hand, yet driven by wider concerns about alienation and
anomie on the other. The three disciplines (Functionalism, Behaviourism and
Scientific Management) informed every organizational design from car
assembly lines to the training of the fighting machine – the army, navy and
airforce. But unlike many, Max Weber, at least, expressed concern at the
reverse side of bureaucratic efficiency: that is, in the moral and political
implications of standardization and routinization, impersonality and inter-
changeability. These processes not only led to efficiency, they also presented
‘an imposing threat to freedom, individualism, and spontaneity’. In other
words, these ‘cherished values’ of a ‘liberal society’ were contradicted by
man’s ‘greatest social invention’ (Page, 1965: 5). For sociologists in particu-
lar, it was necessary to explain patterns of human behaviour in terms of
relationships between people and their shared normative beliefs (Blau,
1965: 23). These patterns later became a focus for the more populist writings
and pronouncements of the Excellence Movement. The various Excellence
writers, as we shall see in due course, were attempting to raise a challenge to
the earlier twentieth-century ideas of change management because they came
to recognize the unintended consequences of rational change – planned from
the drawing board, managed from the centre and leading to a malevolent
repression of the workforce. As Clegg noted:
If organisations are the form of our modern condition, one cannot help but
note that this is frequently represented less as an opportunity or benevolent
phenomenon but more as something which is constraining and repressive.
These elements can be attributed to a pervasive strand of modernist
thinking, clearly articulated as a representative experience of modernity in
the work of Max Weber and his vision of bondage, of the ‘iron cage’.
(1990: 2–3)
Although many textbooks on management see Weber as an advocate of

bureaucracy, his views were, in fact, in opposition to a more conservative
view prevalent in organizational discourse in his time. As he put it: ‘the
passion for bureaucracy is enough to drive one to despair’ because it results
in a ‘parcelling out of the soul’ (Felts and Jos, 1996: 24). Bureaucracy was
nevertheless inevitable because the modern forms of human associations
were located in the nucleus of the modern state and modern capitalism. It is
certain that Weber saw legal–rational authoritative rule as central to all
organizations, including those in the private sector, public sector, and not-for-
profit organizations. In opposition to the conservatives of his time Weber
sought to remove the sacred halo of bureaucracy (Beetham, 1985) and
viewed the bureaucrats as a separate power group in society (Felts and Jos,
1996: 24).
Of particular concern to Weber was the issue of power and compliance.
Why people obeyed others was the central question for Weber and was
reflected in his writings on bureaucracy, religion and politics. Because of the
postmodern attempt to go beyond the traditional paradigm of classical
management towards flexible organizations, getting work done by others has
remained a compelling issue. For Weber the idea that managers in bureau-
cratic organizations could be leaders was an oxymoron (DiPadova, 1996).
The rise of ‘managerial leadership’ during the course of the twentieth century
has, however, challenged certain aspects of the bureaucratic organization by
re-engineering the manager’s role from a controller of the system to ‘corpor-
ate stewardship’, ‘facilitator’ and ‘entrepreneur’. Such descriptions portray
managers as leading actors in a drama with a revolutionary plot. Through
the years, while management theorists and researchers have focused on
motivation and the influence of managers and leaders to influence sub-
ordinates within that process Weber attempted to look at the issue the other
way round by asking what it was about the situation that induced individuals
to be obedient. One of the problems of bureaucracy, for Weber, was that
bureaucratic administrators were not equipped to be leaders: ‘Weber’s well-
known description of the “functionary” who is incapable of forming his or
her own ends allows little room for leadership. In a speech given in 1909,
Weber lamented the dominance of “these little cogs”, whose one preoccupa-
tion in life is becoming a bigger cog’ (Felts and Jos, 1996: 24).
Fordism came to require bureaucracy since, once employed in organiza-
tions, the professional bureaucrat ‘is chained to his activity in his entire
economic and ideological existence . . . in the great majority of cases he is
only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him
an essentially fixed route of march’ (Weber, 1968: 988).
THE EXCELLENCE MOVEMENT: THE ATTEMPT TO CREATE

PERMANENT INNOVATION AND ENTERPRISE
By the 1980s Peters and Waterman (1986) argued that bureaucracy alone
was ineffective in dealing with the management of people and processes.
They cited authors such as Bennis (1968) and Toffler (1980) who advocated
‘adhocracy’ in order to deal ‘with all the new issues that either fall between
bureaucratic cracks or span so many levels in the bureaucracy that it’s not
clear who should be doing what’ (Peters and Waterman 1986: 121). By
contrast, their idea of ‘excellent’ organizations were of fluid organizations:
The concept of organisational fluidity, therefore, is not new. What is new is

that the excellent companies seem to know how to make good use of it.
Whether it’s their rich ways of communicating informally or their special
ways of using ad hoc devices, such as task forces, the excellent companies
get quick action just because their organisations are fluid. (ibid.: 121)
Their views represented the popular concern at that time that modern
organizations were becoming the dinosaurs of the twentieth century because
they were slow to make decisions; inflexible in their adaptation to the
environment; unimaginative in their thinking; incapable of learning beyond
basic stimulus and response processes that failed to question their raison
d’être; and, most importantly, their command and control style of leadership
failed to inspire a sense of corporate community. In 1982 In Search of
Excellence became a best-seller and the most popular book of its time. By
1990 more than five million copies had been sold. One consequence was ‘its
ability to create a niche for the money-spinning Excellence Movement’
(Clutterbuck and Crainer, 1990: 218).
Both Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) and Peters
and Austin’s A Passion for Excellence (1985) were supplemented by others
books such as Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for the Management Revolu-
tion (1987), Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the
Nanosecond Nineties (1992), as well as a range of his other published works
(periodicals, journals, videos). The Excellence debate was enhanced further
by arguments for innovation and entrepreneurship (Kanter, 1983; 1989), and
the need to think ahead to a Post-Capitalist Society (Drucker 1993). Thus, if
stability was a thing of the past, managing change in times of uncertainty and
turbulence became the received wisdom. The core of the early work was the
famous McKinsey 7-S Framework (see Figure 2.1) which served to demon-
strate the interconnectedness of structure, strategy, skills, staff, style and
systems revolving around a central concept of shared values.
The investigations by Peters and Waterman led them to challenge the
rational model by advocating eight attributes or principles:
1 A bias for action: a preference for doing something – anything – rather

than sending a question through cycles and cycles of analyses and
committee reports.
2 Staying close to the customer – learning his preferences and catering to
them.
3 Autonomy and entrepreneurship – breaking the corporation into small
companies and encouraging them to think independently and
competitively.
FIGURE 2.1
The McKinsey 7-S
Structure
framework
Source: Peters and

Waterman 1982
Strategy Systems
Shared
values
Skills Style
Staff
4 Productivity through people – creating in all employees the awareness

that their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards
of the company’s success.
5 Hands-on, value driven – insisting that executives keep in touch with the
firm’s essential business.
6 Stick to the knitting – remaining with the business the company knows
best.
7 Simple form, lean staff – few administrative layers, few people at the
upper levels.
8 Simultaneous loose–tight properties – fostering a climate where there is
dedication to the central values of the company combined with toler-
ance for all employees who accept those values.
These eight principles find their way into the later work of Tom Peters. Three
things were attacked: the Rational Model of Classical Management; the
Human Relations theories; more recent contingency theories. As a result,
four themes emerged in the work of the Excellence Movement. These were:
(a) a focus on customers; (b) the need for constant innovation; (c) that
employees should be regarded as a resource rather than a cost; (d) that
leadership should be inspirational.
How can we account for the success of the Excellence Movement? One
argument is that such populist literature simply provides busy managers with
a shortcut to many complicated issues which are more contentious than they
admit.
On the other hand it would seem that the Excellence Movement can
be defined by a common thread running throughout their books and other
resources. The most repeated theme was the importance of the human side
of enterprise. Despite its weaknesses in methodology, the strength of
the movement was its ability to capture and critique more than fifty years
of management. This led it to challenge the worst attributes of Fordism
by advocating a neo-Human Relations movement. This focus on human re-
sources as the driving force behind the other seven principles listed above
does not explain the success of the movement in terms of its popularity. The
following reasons are provided as a polemic in order to encourage further
debate.
First, the Excellence writers tell a story similar to the script-writers of a
contemporary soap opera. This is not intended to demean their work but to
indicate the mechanics of writing a moving plot. Thus, if the central strategy
is the place of humanity in an organizational drama that occurred over the
twentieth century and which was essentially characterized by the metaphors
bureaucratic, modern, machine culture (which we now refer to as Fordism),
then this story is told through a simple plot and exemplified through
numerous examples that celebrate the plot.
The narrative informing the plot emphasizes the need to understand the
service encounter as a qualitative process through which the customer/client
needs are not only met but exceeded. This is a reminder that the customer
must be seen, not as statistical data, but as a meaningful slice of human
interaction that has critical implications for the development of the organiza-
tion. Attention to customers’ needs requires the organization to cultivate an
awareness of customer perceptions in a way that could not be achieved by
more traditional analyses of market trends. The emphasis on the qualitative
dynamics of the service encounter were central to the development of an
excellent organization. For example, ‘Peters’ books are full of examples
where bad service or a needless lack of consideration towards the customer
has “soured” the customer relationship. A Passion for Excellence has a
chapter entitled “Mere Perception: On the Irreducible Humanness of the
Customer”’ (Barter, 1994: 7).
Second, the need for constant innovation emerged out of the debate
about customers. To focus on customers required a focus on quality and not
quantity and on niche markets rather than mass markets. Therefore, the
message was anticipate customers’ needs and differentiate the product or
service from that provided by others. In order to do that establish organiza-
tional flexibility.
Third, was the argument that employees should be treated as a resource
and not a cost. This people-focused approach to empowerment suggested
that empowered employees require a managerial revolution akin to a leap of
faith. This was to be achieved by restructuring the organization from a
bureaucratic hierarchy to an organic collection of teams with a fluid
exchange of internal customer relationships. The difficulty was in dis-
mantling the role conformity and mechanistic attitudes of the bureaucrat in
favour of an empowered future. This was the only way, we are told, to create
a workplace of experimentation and intrepreneurial activity.
Fourth, leadership was the key to empowerment. In A Passion for

Excellence Peters and Austin argue that:
The concept of leadership is crucial to the revolution now under way – so
crucial that we believe the words ‘managing’ and ‘management’ should be
discarded. ‘Management’, with its attendant images – cop, referee, devil’s
advocate, dispassionate, analyst, naysayer, pronouncer – connotes
controlling and arranging and demeaning and reducing. ‘Leadership’
connotes unleashing energy, building, freeing, and growing. (1985:
Introduction: xvii)
This is interesting given the amount of time that had elapsed between
Weber’s concerns about the nature of bureaucracy and leadership. For
example, Weber argued that while bureaucracy came to represent modernity
as technically efficient it was not conducive to effective leadership because
true leaders were not likely to make it up the hierarchy because the
‘conventions and internal peculiarities of the bureaucratic hierarchy severely
impede the career opportunities of precisely such talents’ (Weber,
1968: 1414).
For the Excellence Movement leadership was simple. It was about
listening, facilitating, and coaching and, above all, reinforcing values (Peters
and Austin, 1985: 37).
EMPOWERMENT
Although empowerment lacks a universal definition, the term has come to

describe a variety of interventions that give more autonomy and an increase
in power to subordinates. Höpfl has argued that in the management lit-
erature the term ‘appears to have come into general usage in the early 1980s.
By the mid-1980s it had become a commonplace expression used in both
practical management texts and in the vocabulary of organizations’
(1994: 39). One problem, however, is that ‘writers on empowerment seem to
be quite coy when examining the concept’ (Collins, 1995: 29). Thus, the
attempt to define empowerment in a universal way is problematic.
Although the term may not have been used until the 1980s, if we see
empowerment as the opposite of alienation, then the origins of the process go
back to a much earlier period of time. In this case our understanding of
empowerment must be located in the international debates – Britain,
America, Scandinavia, Germany, Japan – over alienation, on the one hand,
and industrial democracy on the other. One thing is certain: that despite the
uncertainty of the term ‘empowerment has emerged as an idea and focus for
organizational change’ (ibid.: 32).
The employer/employee relationship during the early phases of indus-
trialization was based, with few exceptions, on distrust between employer
and employee. This relationship was regulated through formal control
systems such as clocks, fines and supervisory management. One consequence

was that industrial unrest remained high since the natural response to the
controls employed by employers was the withdrawal of labour. Such direct
labour control strategies were enhanced further by the standardization of the
work environment. Employees were generally viewed simply as a ‘unit of
labour’. The emergence of Human Relations Theory, however, seemed to
establish a link between employee involvement and productivity levels by
studies of organizational behaviour that focused on employee morale and
motivation. Studies appeared to suggest that performance would be
improved by managers who were able to elicit co-operation by becoming
more sensitive to employee needs. Mayo’s findings resulted in the displace-
ment of utilitarianism by the more appealing aspects of unitarianism which
sought to ‘construct relationships within a unity of purpose and ideology
between managers and employees in the pursuit of common goals’ (Ackers
et al., 1992).
The Human Relations School represented a significant shift in organiza-
tional theory thus superseding Taylorism in favour of a more democratic and
humanistic approach to the management of labour within organizations. By
recognizing the importance of employee relationships and environmental
influences, management was encouraged to consciously intervene in the
informal organization in order to build a new ‘moral order’ based more on
consent than conflict. From these early organizational experiments of the
Human Relations School, the social and behavioural sciences became an
integral part of organizational management and an extensive body of
academic research flourished around the key theme of ‘understanding the
dynamics of human relationships’.
The later focus on job enrichment and job enhancement schemes were
based on Maslow’s (1954) earlier work on motivation. Attention was
focused on how employees could be motivated to expend effort in particular
directions to achieve the organizational goals. There was a recognition that
control of the labour process was not possible through coercion or economic
incentives alone.
New work practices such as the Volvo experiment with work groups
(the Kalmar plant in the early to mid-1970s abandoning the production line
and the Uddevalla plant in the mid to late 1980s with a small team building
a complete car) attempted to reverse the alienating effects of the Fordist
production process by attempting to find more fulfilling ways to enrich
emotional, psychological and social needs of employees. Job rotation, as
promoted by Sweden and her Scandinavian neighbours, was an attempt to
‘redesign work to give workers greater autonomy and more possibility of
deriving some sense of satisfaction and achievement from their labours’
(Brown, 1992: 173).
In the 1960s the ‘Quality of Working Life’ programmes were developed
in an attempt to establish that performance was linked to ‘involvement and
satisfaction’ (Blumberg, 1968: 123). During this time France appointed a
Minister for Job Enrichment, the Swedes set up a Commission on Industrial
Democracy, and the International Labour Organization proclaimed the need

to prioritize the humanization of work (Thompson and McHugh, 1995).
While some authors seem to use the terms employee involvement and
empowerment interchangeably (for example, Bowen and Lawler, 1992), the
latter is focused more on the idea of ‘winning commitment’ than simply
extending decision-making. Empowerment has come to imply a ‘moral’
commitment at an emotional level within the organization. Seen this way, it
is possible to see the Excellence Movement as exemplars of this attempt to
encourage managers to reach into the realm of feelings. Thus, requiring
flatter and leaner structures is one thing but the management of meanings is
of quite a different order since winning the hearts and minds of employees
requires a redistribution of power from the top downwards. Such empower-
ment requires cultural change. For example, if it was possible to draw up a
list of characteristics of empowerment we might include a series of items
ranging from access to information, involvement in decisions through to
actually making decisions, share ownership and a redistribution of rewards.
The further we move along the continuum towards a redistribution of
rewards, the more empowerment has to mean more to employees than the
permission to ‘delight the customer’, as the Excellence Movement implies.
Empowerment ‘has been conceptualised as both a relational and a
motivational construct’ (Andrews and Herschel, 1996: 180). The relational
perspective views empowerment as a function of relationships between
managers and subordinates. It is therefore more a function of delegated
power or power sharing (Burke, 1986). This has been the focus of the
participative management approach from McGregor (1960) and Likert
(1961) through to Quality Management, teambuilding and self-managed
teams. As Andrews and Herschel point out, ‘leaders’ intentions and sub-
ordinates’ perceptions may on occasion differ thus an employee may not
desire the responsibility of participating in the decision-making process’
(1996: 180). As a function of power, empowerment would be characterized
by a concern to accomplish the task rather than by a delegation of formal
authority through status: ‘Power would be used to get the job done, rather
than to stand over others’ (Pacanowsky, 1987: 378). Such a view corre-
sponds to Etzioni’s (1975) comparison of moral compliance compared to the
utilitarian compliance of the wage/effort bargain.
Within the psychological literature empowerment has also been viewed
as a motivational construct (Andrews and Herschel, 1996: 180) through
which individuals are assumed to have a need for power (McClelland, 1975).
From this perspective ‘an individual’s sense of empowerment grows from
managerial strategies and techniques that serve to strengthen the employee’s
feelings of self-determination or self-efficacy’ (Andrews and Herschel,
1996: 180). Andrews and Herschel’s discussion of Conger’s work suggests
that to empower is to create ‘a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy
among organizational members through the identification of conditions that
foster powerlessness [and by eliminating those conditions]’ (Conger,
1986: 474). Thus, factors that contribute to feelings of powerlessness may
arise from several sources, including the organizational environment super-

visory style, reward systems, or job design. Conversely, the absence of
empowerment is characterized by feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and
helplessness (Rappaport, 1984).
Finally, it is noteworthy that empowerment has been located as a direct
attempt to solve the problems of the alienation datable in the 1950s and
1960s. Thomas and Velthouse (1990), for example, reflect this earlier debate
about technological determinists, such as Blauner (1966) by identifying four
components of work – impact, choice, competence and meaningfulness – that
relate closely to Blauner’s original components of experienced alienation:
powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation and self-estrangement. Thus,
‘impact’ (whether accomplishing a particular task or job will make a
difference in the scheme of things) addresses problems associated with ‘self-
estrangement’ by involving people in decisions related to work processes;
‘choice’ (the degree to which personal behaviour is self-determined) addresses
problems associated with powerlessness by creating more control over the
work process; ‘meaningfulness’ is a direct corollary of meaninglessness;
‘competence’ (referring to level of skill) does not appear to have a direct
equivalent to Blauner’s characteristics of alienation.
STRATEGIC DOWNSIZING
Organizational restructuring – or downsizing – has usually taken the form of

closures, mergers and acquisitions. Downsizing has been defined as ‘one
tactic within a corporate strategy for shifting the organizational structure
from what it is now to what it has to be in order to sustain competitive edge
and satisfy customers’ needs’ (Band and Tustin, 1995: 36). Downsizing is
also ‘one of the most disruptive and dramatic types of organizational change
which most leaders are likely to experience’ (Drew, 1994: 1). These initiatives
are thought to represent ‘an early stage of a continuing, long-term, socio-
economic evolution. More than simply shrinking the workforce of an
organization, much of the change seems to represent a permanent shift in
social, economic, and organizational structures’ (Lewin and Johnston,
1996: 1; McKinley et al., 1995). Certain environmental pressures are said to
lead to downsizing resulting in a paradigm shift from mass production/high
volume (from ‘bigger-is-better’) to niche markets (‘lean-and-mean’).
But is downsizing simply another name for getting rid of employees in
the desire to be increasingly efficient? If so, then this would contradict the
aims of the Excellence Movement. However, if it is seen as a strategic
organizational objective and involves employees in the process, then it takes
on both an ethical and a pragmatic role. This leads Band and Tustin (1995)
to argue that: ‘If the objective of downsizing should be to raise productivity
per head’, then
Strategic downsizing can achieve this – layoffs cannot. It is possible to plan

to reduce a workforce. In the absence of severe financial and environmental
factors, which usually dictate an immediate layoff, downsizing can be
carried out with the full commitment of the workforce to the long-term
benefit of the company. (1995: 45)
Consequently, it is suggested that employee involvement is possible under

certain conditions which, following Cameron et al. (1991) requires that
everyone sees the urgency of organizational survival.
When downsizing is viewed as a strategic necessity, it becomes known as
rightsizing. Organizational rightsizing therefore seeks to reshape the organ-
ization by establishing core and peripheral employees. The flexible firm is
then, in theory, able to respond to the flexibility of the marketplace. Two
types of employees emerge: core workers with guaranteed job security, and a
ring of flexible labour force that expands or contracts as the need arises.
The Excellence Movement was said to be a paradigm shift marking a
break with the past. It appeared to become the post-bureaucratic solution by
redesigning organizations with ‘flatter structures’ and ‘flexible’ ways of
working. However, the post-bureaucratic form of adhocracy and fluidity
encouraged by empowerment programmes and by the Excellence Movement
in particular has also become identified with the problems of downsizing.
The latter carry behavioural and perceptual implications detrimental to the
aims of the former. Thompson and O’Connell Davison (1995) illustrate these
implications as follows.
1 Organizations decentralize by breaking up their bureaucracies into

smaller or independent units.
2 One solution is to outsource or disaggregate to increase ‘flexibility’.
3 To replace bureaucratic structures and rational strategic planning in
order to deal with unpredictable environments (Kanter, 1989) –
disorganization – with tactical planning.
4 Delayering to create leaner and meaner organizations that have ‘down-
sized’ to the essential core by removing whole layers of middle
management.
Each has implications for Strategic Human Resource Development. For

example, disaggregation requires a deconcentration of capital thus reversing
‘the historic trend towards vertical integration’ (Thompson and O’Connell
Davidson, 1995). Delayering and downsizing often provide a neutral lan-
guage to legitimate sacking employees and yet require more effective com-
munication by those who remain through self-managed teams. In addition,
career paths and rewards are transformed from an individualized employ-
ment relationship to a greater reliance on other collective means for manag-
ing each other.
Although the justification for restructuring often takes the form of a
discourse about organizational crisis, it also reflects a dimension of organiza-
tional change that views efficiency in terms of redefined flat organizational
structures and new management strategies based on empowerment. Of major

concern is the way in which the ‘accountancy’ of downsizing – focusing on
reducing costs – contradicts the approach sought by the Excellence Move-
ment. The predominance of the debate on cost reduction has led to an
unhealthy cynicism regarding the motives for organizational change.
Although turbulent environments are becoming the norm, McHugh has
stated that ‘management within organizations stands accused of looking at
the needs of the organization and overlooking the needs of employees’
leading to an imbalance between organizational needs and employee needs
(1997: 345). The failure rate of downsized organizations appears to be high
for a variety of reasons that include: (a) the failure of key decision-makers to
estimate the complexity of change issues related to the integration of
organizations with diverse working practices and organizational cultures;
(b) a significant drain on resources that impairs performance; and (c) an
under-estimation of the depth of human issues triggered in a merger or
acquisition (Marks, 1997). One estimate suggests that less than 20 per cent
of merged organizations achieve their goal of maximizing financial and
strategic objectives (Davidson, 1991). Another estimate has reported that
‘more than half the 135 major U.S. companies that attempted massive
restructuring failed to achieve significant increases in their value relative to
their competition’ (Tomasko, 1992: 1).
Many factors account for this failure rate including: ‘paying the wrong
price, buying for the wrong reason, selecting the wrong partner or buying at
the wrong time. Another reason, however, that contributes to the high failure
rate is managing the post-merger integration process inappropriately’
(Marks, 1997). However, many organizations that failed to achieve the
desired cost reductions often do so because they fail to consider the human
side of the process (Koonce, 1991).
Some of the worst examples of management strategies of downsized
organizations result from the ‘mafia model’ (Stebbins, 1989: 46) in which
change is badly planned and executed and carries severe psychological
implications both for those who lose their jobs and for the organization’s
survivors who, in their different ways, suffer insecurity and loss. At an
organizational level ‘a poorly executed downsizing operation can traumatize
a company for years’ (Drew, 1994: 1). At an individual level it can lead to
mixed feelings of psychological survival in the form of ‘survivor guilt’ and
‘survivor envy’ (ibid.). Remaining employees may only marginally feel that
they are the lucky ones since downsizing can significantly affect commitment
by instilling a sense of insecurity and alienation. Consequently, this may lead
to ‘distraction, disloyalty and the withdrawing of any form of commitment
to the goals and values of the organisation’ since those who remain ‘may also
experience high anxiety as to their own job permanence, guilt from the loss
of friends among their co-workers or even deeply rooted anger arising from
any insensitivity shown in the downsizing process’ (Zeffane and Mayo
1994: 7). An example of psychological survival is provided by Doherty et al.
in their study of survivors at British Telecom. As they point out, the scale of
the downsizing was enormous:
On 31 July 1992, 20,000 BT employees left the company in a voluntary
downsizing exercise which cost BT many millions of pounds in redundancy
payments and hurt its share price. Since then BT has run annual ‘release
schemes’ each involving over 10,000 people. Twelve thousand more job
losses were targeted for the financial year ending in March 1996. BT has
cut its workforce from 244,000 in 1989 to 120,000, at a cost of about £24
billion, with further cuts in the pipeline. (Doherty et al., 1996: 53)
In the BT case the survivors had, first, to come to terms with the sudden loss
of colleagues and close friends. Second, they had to reconcile themselves to
the possibility that they might lose their own jobs at some point in the future.
Third, they had to accept an increase in workload that in turn led to
increased stress.
A series of contrasts emerged. At the organizational level survivors saw
a positive future for the organization, yet at the individual level, survivors
expressed ‘a marked decrease in motivation’ because ‘confidence in a per-
sonal future with the organization was eroded’. Thus, loyalty to the organ-
ization diminished as job insecurity increased. As the work group ‘became
the focus for BT survivors’ their ‘friendships with colleagues and support
from their line manager became their means of survival’. Line managers in
particular suffered from anxieties since ‘Not only did they have their
personal worries about their own jobs, but they felt they were frequently
blamed by subordinates as the cause of their distress’ (Doherty et al.,
1996: 54). Such experiences demonstrate discontinuity at both the organiza-
tional and individual levels. Individuals cope in different ways but such
uncertain transitions become ‘passages of adjustment’.
PROGRAMMED APPROACHES TO CHANGE:

TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT, BUSINESS PROCESS
REENGINEERING AND TEAMWORK
Total quality management
The history of quality management has moved beyond its original focus on
engineering systems theory to incorporate both social and behavioural
science. This has resulted in a hybrid form combining a mixture of the
engineering components (quality systems, statistical process control) with
behavioural processes (Action Research, Soft Systems theory, team building,
and culture management). In the UK, empowerment was introduced in order
to facilitate ownership of specific ideas and actions as they developed at
appropriate levels throughout the company.
Although there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, the
general principles are widely agreed. The concept is aimed at getting the
organization, and everyone in it, to concentrate on doing the right things,

then finding efficient methods of performance to eliminate faults and con-
stantly seeking more effective approaches to management and more efficient
methods for achieving performance. This means that each person must
recognize how their individual actions will affect others who depend upon
their outputs.
The general concept of quality management evolved internationally
from existing management practices. However, the main ideas have been
attributed to major Japanese companies who adopted quality assurance prin-
ciples from American specialists such as Juran and Deming who developed
quality improvement programmes in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was
a direct result of the Marshall Plan to redevelop the Japanese economy. Juran,
for example, introduced the idea of fitness for purpose and Deming developed
the application of statistical process control associated with quality manage-
ment practices. In recent years a whole range of quality tools and techniques
have been introduced for decision-making, problem-solving and data gather-
ing. These include: force field analysis, cause and effect analysis, Pareto analy-
sis, brainstorming, mind mapping and creativity techniques.
The word quality has a variety of meanings which can be a source of
confusion. The Oxford Dictionary describes quality as ‘degree of excellence’,
‘relative nature or kind or character’. But this definition does not cover all
uses of the word and leaves room for further interpretation. For example,
from a manufacturer’s point of view, quality provides complete customer
satisfaction if it matches the agreed specification. From a marketing view-
point, quality is the ability to provide goods or services valued by customers.
From the customer’s viewpoint, quality is defined by how well his or her
individual needs are satisfied. The British Standards Institute provides guid-
ance for the use of quality. This is shown to be used for several distinct
purposes:
• A comparative sense or degree of excellence, whereby products and ser-
vices may be ranked, or a relative basis, sometimes referred to as ‘grade’.
• In a quantitative sense as used in manufacturing, product release and for
technical evaluations, sometimes referred to as the ‘quality level’.
• In a ‘fitness for purpose’ sense which relates the evaluation of a product
or service to its ability to satisfy a given need.
• For the purpose of quality management the definition used is ‘the totality
of features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its
ability to satisfy stated or implied needs’.
The predominant history of quality management in the past 20 years can be
encapsulated by three major trends:
• Quality assurance, particularly the notion of ‘conformance to specifica-
tions’ which focused on control. Authors such as Shewart, Feigenbaum
and Juran provided advice from the 1930s onwards to demonstrate the
importance of quantifiable and measurable techniques.
• The amorphous and absolute definition of excellence provided by the

Excellence movement.
• The service characteristics of quality which originally emerged from the
service marketing literature but has more recently been driven by the
European Quality Foundation.
The main vehicle for continuous improvement, however, was not so much the
tools and techniques but the application of neo-Human Relations theories.
These focused mainly on teamwork, leadership, motivation, and culture man-
agement. In the West, however, in the eager attempt to catch up with the
progress of Japan’s leading manufacturing industries of the 1970s and 1980s,
the quality management agenda adopted the ideas of planned change from the
discipline of Organizational Development. Unlike the Japanese concept of
kaizen, quality management was more like a transformational and messianic
movement that needed to introduce a whole raft of techniques through new
behavioural and attitudinal lenses.
As a result, quality management became a planned change intervention
which sought to do the following:
1 Obtain an organizational consensus about values regarding political

interests as unitary. This was reinforced by a central philosophy that
sought a unity of purpose for all employees. This became difficult to
sustain in the face of differences in physical conditions, earnings, pay and
rewards.
2 Identify the sequence (or steps) of change leading from the current dys-
functional state to one with enlightened quality practices. Change there-
fore represented, in the Lewinian sense, sequential linear stages
beginning with (a) unfreezing of the present state moving to (b) a transi-
tional state represented by the internalization of the quality programme
to (c) refreezing the new state of normality represented by enlightenment.
Unfortunately quality came to be seen more as an event despite its often
cited use of the rhetorical journey metaphor characteristic of OD.
3 Use the organization’s culture as a technique to manage attitudes, behav-
iours and work practices. The advantage was the attempt to move the
locus of control from classical bureaucratic approaches with their heavy
emphasis on supervision and managerial mindwork to neo-Human Rela-
tions approaches of empowered teams who came to control their own
activities and behaviours. One of the major problems, however, was the
top-down, paternalistic and democratized consensus required by this
type of culture change programme.
These assumptions are common to all planned Organizational Development

approaches and have their origins in the application of the planning models of
Lippitt et al. (1958) and Kolb and Frohman (1970).
A number of problems are evident in these assumptions which include
the following. First, the requirement to achieve value consensus fails to
address key political issues such as, who makes the decisions? How much
transparency exists in the decision-making process? Whose interests are
served? The assumption that organizational values are unitary rather than
pluralistic leads to an unhelpful intervention that fails to deal with the organ-
ization’s dynamics. Thus, to recognize the importance of social and inter-
pretive dynamics in change situations is fundamental to the skills and
activities of the change agent. A second problem is the formulaic way that
quality management has often been introduced to organizations. In such cases
consultancy packages are installed in different types of organizations with
different external and internal operating environments. Consequently, they
may fail to deal with (a) different contingencies and (b) the specific needs of
the client system. A third major problem has been the tendency to view
change as an event leading to the illusion that once introduced, quality has
been successfully achieved and can be demonstrated through quality assur-
ance. Consequently, such an approach may be inflexible and fail to deal with
critical management and operational processes required for continuous
improvement. Finally, there is often a tendency, especially in the public sector,
to view quality as simply another administrative control mechanism rather
than a highly dynamic learning orientated process. Public sector organiza-
tions such as hospitals, universities, local authorities, etc. often spend too
much time demonstrating the traceability of the quality system rather than
continuously improving organizational effectiveness. This may be cata-
strophic when it causes people to satisfy the needs of the system rather than
the customer. This is not only a contradiction in terms, it also represents a
return to the problems originally identified by Robert Merton in the 1950s
with his critique of bureaucratic dysfunctions.
Business processing reengineering
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) emerged in 1990 from a paper on

business process redesign by Davenport and Short (1990). The term became
referred to as BPR as a result of Hammer’s (1990) paper ‘Reengineering
Works: don’t automate, obliterate’ in the Harvard Business Review. In the
1990s BPR became the most cited technique for organizational transforma-
tion despite the fact that results were not tried and tested over time. By the late
1990s disillusionment had set in:
To most business people in the United States, re-engineering has become a
word that stands for restructuring, layoffs, and too-often failed change
programmes. At a recent Boston forum, in fact, Michael Hammer gathered
a group of business journalists to explore why re-engineering had become
such a tainted term . . . The rock that re-engineering has foundered on is
simple: people. Re-engineering treated the people inside companies as if they
were just so many bits and bytes, interchangeable parts to be re-engineered.
But no one wants to be re-engineered. (Deakins and Makgill, 1997: 81)
These views are reminiscent of the earlier critical debate about Scientific
Management. Whether intended or not, the technique was adopted in a
FIGURE 2.2
A typical BPR Establishing the vision and cascading the concept
programme from the top of the organization in order that employees understand the purpose
and rationale of the initiate. This process requires top management to demonstrate
commitment to the process.
Identification of key business processes in need of redesign

By establishing project teams who identify measurable objectives for redesigning
the critical processes.
Evaluation of the problems and benchmarking for improvement

The project team clarify the critical problems and identify opportunities to be
gained from redesigning processes.
Transformational actions
Which should begin in a small controlled environment moving sequentially through
the process chain. To be successful the transformational actions are seen to require
critical management processes of leadership, training, redeployment of technical
and human resources and motivation.
Evaluation of the programme

In order to identify the extent to which the objectives have been achieved.
highly mechanistic way with little or no regard for the unintended conse-
quences that would affect the subjects of BPR. People became increasingly
suspicious of the motives, techniques, and objectives of BPR.
Although BPR was initially viewed as pioneering by addressing organiza-
tional change through process activities and work redesign, BPR interven-
tions, in practice, lacked humanistic values, focused on short-term financial
gain, and lacked an agreed methodology. Like TQM, the transformational
stages tend to follow those represented in Figure 2.2.
BPR has become synonymous with downsizing, layoffs, and viewing
people as expendable costs. It was this last point, in particular, that made it
different from the claims of the Excellence Movement, and TQM which
viewed people as assets or human resources to be cultivated and developed.
BPR in the 1990 came to represent the return of Leviathan despite the original
intentions of its advocates. In its worst manifestations BPR encouraged a
return to social engineering, so reminiscent of the first half of the twentieth
century, which resulted in people being seen as costs. The concept of change
management became tainted with failure.
In the USA, for example, a survey of 1,468 restructured companies
conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management estimated that
more than half reported that employee productivity either stayed the same or
deteriorated after layoffs resulting from BPR (Guimaraes and Bond, 1996).
Reasons for failure include:
• processes applied to intangible targets;

• root causes of business problems inadequately defined;
• too radical and fails to establish positive organizational learning during

the transitional state;
• changes fail because attitudes, behaviours, and values are not addressed
effectively;
• the pressure to produce quick results leads to a failure to identify unin-
tended consequences of actions;
• alienation of employees;
• creation of a less friendly working environment;
• loss of expertise becomes expensive to company;
• survivor syndrome in which remaining employees are more introspective
and risk averse and distrust management.
While organizations do report some benefits in improved productivity, qual-

ity, profits, customer satisfaction, down time, etc., on average, surveys reveal
that as an intervention strategy, BPR seems disappointing.
Teamwork
Teamwork has become one of the fundamental approaches of contemporary

management. Teams have been promoted and popularized because they are
seen as a focus for unification and as a means of making the organization
more efficient and productive. Countless books and articles have been written
on the virtues of teamwork and numerous consultants have earned their living
from the courses, books and packages they have sold to clients. Teams have
proliferated to include task forces, cross-functional teams, action teams, steer-
ing committees, problem-solving teams, self-managed teams, etc. Teamwork
is a relatively recent phenomenon, but one that has been driven by four of the
six key strategies identified in this chapter – Excellence, innovation and enter-
prise; empowerment; downsizing; TQM and BPR.
The psycho-dynamics of groups have long been the subject of investiga-
tion by OD practitioners and by Tavistock researchers in particular. Yet it
was not until the neo-Human Relations theories of the Excellence Movement
and TQM that teamwork was adopted as a technique designed to overcome
the damaging consequences of the separation of mental and manual labour
designed on the drawing board of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
During the past 20 years or so, the use of teams within organizations has
grown dramatically. The experimental origins of teams go back to the 1960s
with the development of the T-group and most authors attribute the func-
tional development of teams in organization with the Volvo Kalmar plant
that reduced defects by 90 per cent in 1987. Quality improvement became
popularized by quality circles in almost every industry but their effectiveness
was doubtful. Like many other quality initiatives they ‘started with a great
fanfare and then fizzled’ (Bounds et al., 1996).
In the attempt to reverse the problems of alienation typified by high
volume mass production lines of earlier periods, autonomous self-managed
work teams emerged in the 1990s and sought to link employee involvement
to decision-making. They sought to empower teams by abolishing the role of

supervisors and acquiring all managerial functions such as being accountable
for their actions, and planning and scheduling of tasks. According to
Sexton:
the study of autonomous work groups continued from a socio-technical

systems perspective . . . and was also incorporated into job design studies as
‘self-regulated’ or ‘self-managed’ work groups. The members of the group
had the authority to handle the internal processes as they saw fit in order to
generate a specific group product, service, or decision. (1994: 46).
In so doing, it moved the locus of control away from the manager or

supervisor, who previously had responsibility for planning, record keeping,
and scheduling of tasks to the team.
If teamwork was a valuable OD technique, it was unfortunately also
exploited in the attempt to downsize and delayer the organization. This has
also led to charges of teamwork as neo-Taylorism. For example, it has been
argued that the incorporation of teamwork into programmed approaches to
managing organizations, such as quality management and BPR, has led to an
ideology of empowerment which sought to alter the mind-sets, values and
culture of the organization in the attempt to utilize the ‘same tired manipula-
tion and productivity agendas which fill the diary of modernist business
history’ (Boje and Winsor, 1993: 57). As a result, what really has changed
according to this argument is not a real increase in empowerment but a self-
imposed control by the team. It has even been suggested that teamwork may
perpetuate surveillance and control and that employees become their own
‘thought police’ with the team gaze representing Bentham’s Panopticon
(Steingard and Fitzgibbons, 1993: 32). While there are wholehearted advo-
cates of teamwork, it is important to recognize that the critics are more
critical of the rhetoric and ideology of late twentieth-century capitalism than
teamwork per se.
Advocates argue that teamwork facilitates collaborative efforts to solve
quality-related problems by placing responsibility for quality improvement
with the team. From the perspective of quality management it is claimed that
it permits greater sharing of information and facilitates greater co-operative
approaches to continuous improvement (Oakland: 1989). The benefits of
teamwork are usually said to include: (a) increased employee motivation
through enhanced employee involvement; (b) increased productivity by
teams creating synergy; (c) increased employee satisfaction through collabo-
rative interactions rather than individualistic self-interest; (d) increased com-
mitment to goals because of the social pressures exerted by the team;
(e) expanded job skills and organizational flexibility through multi-skilling,
job rotation; and (f) the creation of a more customer-focused culture that
improves communication and the quality of service provided to the customer.
Against this, it can be argued that in recent years, the introduction of teams
in most organizations has been associated with cuts in staff in the form of
downsizing with fewer people doing more work.
The dangers of teamwork also need to be stated and as Drew and

Coulson-Thomas argue, teamwork is not risk free:
There have been notable disappointments and critical re-evaluation of
teamwork since . . . the . . . 1980s. For instance: although Florida Light and
Power was the first non-Japanese winner of the Deming prize for quality in
1989, with 1,900 quality teams involving three-quarters of employees, in
1990 CEO Jim Broadhead abandoned most of these quality process teams,
citing a loss of customer focus and excessive rigidity as the reason for his
decision. Others have also cautioned against transplanting notions of
teamwork from observation of Japanese firms to the more individualistic
cultural and social setting of North America or the UK.
High-energy team effort has enormous potential for promoting
change. However, it is rapidly becoming an overworked nostrum – the
benefits are all-too-often exaggerated and the difficulties underestimated
. . . Despite the instances of outstanding success by empowered and self-
managed teams, there are numerous (but less well publicized) disappoint-
ments. (1996: 8)
The recent preoccupation with teamwork can lead to a collective amnesia

about the creative ability of individuals who do not work in teams. Further-
more, there is some evidence that individuals operating within a loose
network or coalition regularly achieve more effective results than formal
teams (ibid.). But rather than see teamwork as a universal solution to a
variety of problems, it may be better to consider alternatives such as
‘communities of practice’ (Marshall et al., 1995) that relate to knowledge
shared by loose coalitions of people who develop their own tacit knowledge
and methods for doing things. This is more common among certain pro-
fessions such as lawyers, barristers, GPs, or academics whose conduct is
regulated by professional associations and who share a similarity of attitudes
and conventions.
The self-managed work team is associated with the more pro-active
organizations that have moved away from the need to maintain management
or supervisory control over the team. It has, on the one hand, been defined as
the productivity breakthrough of the 1990s (Sexton, 1994). The most
popular reasons cited for the development of the self-managed team include:
quality improvement, cutting service errors and reducing defect rates.
Self-managed teams have been implemented to improve quality, pro-
ductivity and quality of work life. They can be defined as teams of inter-
dependent members who self-regulate their behaviour (Cumming and Griggs,
1976; Goodman et al., 1988) through (a) face-to-face interaction (Goodman
et al., 1988); (b) the inter-relationship of tasks and responsibilities in the co-
production of a service and/or a product; and (c) discretion over decision-
making of tasks, methods for achieving them and work scheduling (ibid.).
Unlike quality circles, self-managed work teams move responsibility for
quality down to the point of production. This creates a tension between the
needs of the productive system and the needs of the social group. For
example, if the purpose of the self-managed team is (a) to improve the quality
of the working life of its members by meeting their socio-psychological needs
on the one hand and (b) to increase organizational effectiveness and product-
ivity by restructuring working relationships, on the other, then a balance
between the two will inevitably be a movable feast.
The claims for effectiveness of such teams are based on the assumption
that changed behaviours and attitudes will lead to increased productivity.
These changed behaviours and attitudes include empowered decision-
making; self-regulation and self-control; control over the quality of working
life and other change-related issues affecting the team (Manz and Sims,
1987). In addition, commitment is related to the traditional issues of job
design identified by Hackman and Oldham (1975). This includes job enrich-
ment through task variety, autonomy, identity, significance and feedback.
Other writers have argued that team members perform more effectively by
sharing power and rewards (Lawler, 1986).
While we are attempting to dismantle some of the problems of a Fordist
past, we fail to recognize a whole series of control mechanisms that
contradict the spirit of co-operation underlying teamwork. Many companies
introduce teams to develop talent, and ideas in order to encourage shared
knowledge throughout a workplace. But they may also fail to provide
adequate mechanisms for self-management and performance appraisal. Con-
sequently, teams may get tangled up in a web of contradictions between
control and empowerment. Thus, ‘Initiatives to increase worker commitment
through increased autonomy have clashed with efforts to standardize work
methods in the interests of achieving process control’ (Donnellon,
1996: 34).
The increase in mergers, take-overs and international collaboration has
led not only to increases in flexible teamworking methods but also to an
increased emphasis on interpersonal communication between people of
different cultures. International teams are seen to be more complicated than
those composed of a single nationality. New challenges emerge because,
while ‘Mixed nationalities in a team can bring richer and more appropriate
solutions’ they can also ‘bring increased communication difficulties, inter-
personal conflicts and substantially higher costs’ (Canney Davison, 1994).
CONCLUSION
Weber’s analysis of the bureaucratic machine and his concern about its
negative implications for the spiritual/values-oriented aspects of human life
appeared to find an echo in the popular writings of the Excellence Move-
ment. In the attempt to restructure bureaucracy, the Excellence Movement
successfully promoted a simple solution, to focus on interpersonal relation-
ships with the customer and employees. In some respects they went beyond
the simplistic assertions of various quality management programmes by
arguing that employees were more than a set of internal customers with
exchange values. Indeed, they celebrated achievement and entrepreneurial

activity. And then came strategic downsizing. The flexible firm met the
flexible marketplace and the movement towards empowerment in organiza-
tions was challenged by the accountancy of cost reduction. As the twentieth
century drew to a close the empowered solutions that sought to redress the
problems of Fordism (by implication, bureaucracy with coercive physical and
psychological controls resulting in alienation) were in retreat.
In one way or another each of these interventions were highly pre-
scriptive. They invariably result from the interventions of management
consultants in conjunction with chief executives or other senior managers.
All of these interventions are planned by an ‘expert’ in the form of plans,
recipes and formulas for the organization to follow. Each involves changing
the structure of an organization in some way to make it more flexible. Some
of these interventions are, however, more political than others. Where the
concepts of empowerment and excellence carried through the implications of
Human Relations theory to develop and work with people, downsizing, by
contrast, was driven by the increased competition of the global
marketplace.
Those interventions that are politically prescriptive lack transparency.
They become policies defined and secretly exploited by a small cadre of
senior executives. By 2001 senior managers of two giants of British and
American industry – Marconi and Enron – had not only deceived their
employees, they had also deceived shareholders, wrecked their companies yet
managed to pay themselves excessive bonuses and fringe benefits for doing
so.
FURTHER READING
Weber’s (1968) text is essential for its description of sociological concerns

related to modernity. Blau’s (1965) re-evaluation of Weber’s text discusses
the ‘dysfunctions’ of bureaucracy that Weber did not foresee. The third
classic text is Etzioni (1964) who discusses the power dimension of modern
organizations. The critiques evident in each of the classic texts are redrafted
and redefined for management practice by Peters and Waterman (1982)
who argued that bureaucracy alone was ineffective in dealing with the
management of people and processes. The text by Peters and Austin (1985)
clearly adopts Weber’s concern with the decline of leadership where it is
argued that managers should be replaced by leaders. A useful critique of
empowerment is Ackers et al. (1992). Bounds et al. (1996) provide a useful
descriptive text on quality and Davenport’s (1993) text on BPR is usefully
supplemented by an account of its decline in Deakins and Makgill (1997).
3 Analysing culture
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Approaches to analysing culture
• Functional analysis
• The interpretive approach: culture as negotiated meaning
• The analysis of cultural codes
• Analysing discourse: speech acts, metaphors and organizational culture
• Developing organizational cultures
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 2 identified six strategies that were precursors to our understanding

of the management of change in the twenty-first century – organizational
design, innovation and enterprise, empowerment, strategic downsizing,
TQM and BPR, and teamwork. It was noted that each strategy contained an
ideology for managing change. Each type of intervention strategy was
described as essentially prescriptive for two reasons. First, because it sought
to change the structure of an organization in some way in order to make it
more effective. Second, each requires an expert, sometimes with guru status,
to design the plans, recipes and formulas for the organization to follow. We
also noted that while certain change strategies were more political than
others and offered a formula for success, each contained internal contra-
dictions that limited the success of the change. By contrast, this chapter
A n a l y s i n g C u l t u re  63
recognizes that all change contains its own contradictions and that the wise
thinker or skilful change agent must strive for the goal of enlightenment. Let
me explain this further.
All the change strategies previously mentioned involve the manipulation
of an organization’s culture in some way. Most strategies sought to radically
transform an organization with a new formula for change. Most, therefore,
required the organization to reinvent itself with a new ideology of mean-
ing and purpose reinforced by tools and techniques. But a new approach,
such as the adoption of a new technology, requires a careful diagnosis of
the organization’s culture. The failure to recognize this places the change
agents in a precarious position because they unwittingly become the storm-
troopers of change management. Such tactics rarely transform the hearts and
minds of employees. So, how does one engage the willing co-operation of
employees? How does the vision get successfully transformed into the
mission and critical success factors in such a way that it becomes a valued
activity for all?
The starting point for this process is to acknowledge what we have
learnt from the planned strategies of change discussed in the previous
chapter. Essentially, we have gained tools and techniques in organizational
design, innovation and enterprise, empowerment, strategic downsizing,
TQM and BPR, and teamwork. These are all extremely useful. To move
beyond this we must engage with a process of continual learning and
discovery. And, to do this, we need to analyse the capability of the organiza-
tion through its culture.
1 Approaches to analysing culture: the history of organizational culture as

an analytical concept derived from anthropology but popularized and
reconstructed as a management tool.
2 Functional analysis of an organization’s culture which is said to be
composed of traits, patterned behaviours and social relationships that
must be fully integrated to achieve an effective organization.
3 Interpretive approaches to culture which regard cultural integration as
problematic, temporary and a continuously negotiated arena of volatile
social interactions. The use of the drama metaphor discussed further in
Chapters 5 and 6 is particularly useful as a device for observation.
4 The analysis of cultural codes which reveal activities that range from
formal to deeper levels of meaning. The latter are usually expressed
elliptically through metaphoric codes. By observing these linguistic
codes we can analyse semantic rules which inform people’s
perceptions.
5 Developing organizational cultures that question in what circumstances
we should attempt to manage culture. Other issues addressed are:
whether culture change is always manipulative, the need to develop a
robust safety culture, changing attitudes to workplace harassment,
bullying, stress and discrimination.
APPROACHES TO ANALYSING CULTURE
Organizational diagnosis requires the change agent to assess how well the
culture of the organization fits its purpose. In the private sector, for example,
the purpose will be defined by market trends and the ability to exploit
opportunities in the face of competition. In the public sector, the purpose will
be defined by political policies that demand effectiveness, efficiency and
accountability for the public good. An examination of the organization’s
culture is the key to this process.
In recent years it has become acceptable practice to talk about organiza-
tional culture as the expression of rituals, stories, sagas and myths. Such
expressions of culture provided a discourse of Eastern promise by offering
the potential for organizational improvement and Western salvation
(Hickman and Silva, 1987) and by inviting a cultural analysis of organiza-
tional life. The popular discovery of ritual accomplishments and stories of
success promoted culture management as the vehicle for enhanced perform-
ance (Peters and Waterman, 1986; Deal and Kennedy, 1988). Consequently,
‘the concerns of the organization studies avant-garde became redefined from
systems and structures to culture and symbolism’ (Jeffcutt, 1994).
Despite provocative questions being asked about the legitimacy of
culture management (Silver, 1987; Thompson and McHugh, 1995) and
about the effectiveness of culture on bottom-line performance (Lim, 1995),
management rhetoric has focused its discourse of organizational restructur-
ing on post-bureaucratic transformations (managing chaos, disorganization,
disaggregation, delayering etc.) by presenting a recurrent theme of turbulent
times (Thompson and O’Connell Davidson, 1995). Much of the rhetoric
adopted a democratized, top-down concern with culture change and culture
management: defined by the employer rather than the employee.
Organizational culture is a relatively recent conceptual tool for man-
agers. This was due largely to the popularity of the Excellence Movement
and by Peters and Waterman (1982) in particular who influenced the
thinking of managers by suggesting that corporate success required a strong
culture. As a result, organizational culture became the route to competitive
advantage. A second source of popular interest emerged from writers on
Japanese methods of work. Writers such as Ouchi and Jaeger (1978)
influenced the ‘Japanization’ of Western organizations by arguing that
Japan’s economic success and meteoric economic development resulted from
their strong corporate cultures. The concept of organizational culture as an
issue for organizational analysis and development is therefore of recent
origin. The reasons for the development of the concept appear to be twofold.
First, is the recognition that classical quantitative and ‘scientific’ approaches
were no longer as appropriate as they had been thought to be earlier in the
century. Second, is the realization that the world’s first industrial nation,
Britain, and the world’s most successful and prolific nation during the
twentieth century, the USA, were being overtaken by Japan.
Such differences were explained in cultural terms by researchers making

comparative studies. Hickman and Silva (1987), for example, saw this as the
replacement of Fordism, with its emphasis on systems and control to ‘com-
plexity management’ which, by contrast, emphasizes (a) shared perspectives
between different stakeholders; (b) creativity; and (c) social relationships.
Studies of organizational culture emerged in management literature from
earlier Structural–Functional anthropological and sociological origins. How-
ever, the more recent interpretive approaches were largely ignored. As a
result, the culture concept became infused with sound-bite clichés such as
‘strong’, ‘empowered’, ‘power’, ‘task’, ‘role’, ‘the way we do business around
here’ that promised more than they could deliver. These similes of gross over-
simplification are intended to portray the layers of complexity that character-
ize the corporate culture. For example, one is almost tempted to say that the
recipe becomes: if you want to manage the corporate culture think of it ‘like
an onion’.
Despite the superficiality of popular writings, the study of organizational
culture has the potential to provide a penetrating analysis. In the interests of
this debate we need to redress the balance by rediscovering the roots of the
concept where we will find a more meaningful definition of culture.
The earliest and most succinct is the anthropological definition by
Edward Tylor in 1891: ‘That complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits
acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor, 1891: 37). Organizational
culture may be defined, therefore, as the sum total of the learned behaviour
traits, beliefs and characteristics of the members of a particular organization.
The key word in the above definition is learned, which distinguishes culture
from behaviours that result from biological inheritance. Consequently,
learned behaviour is the one factor that distinguishes humans from other
animals. This requires the ability to communicate at a highly sophisticated
level. The human faculty for symbolic communication facilitates the acquisi-
tion of culture and makes it possible for humans to transmit culture between
generations.
Communication is what makes culture. Humans communicate with
symbols in four basic ways. The first is spoken language, patterns of sounds
with meanings attached to each. Spoken language facilitates learning and
communication. The second method of communication is written language,
the graphic recording of spoken language which facilitates the preservation of
learning and the legacy of culture. The third is body language which denotes
the exchange of meanings through gestures and body postures. Finally,
humans communicate through artefacts. The study of this is known as semi-
otic communication.
FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS
The modern study of culture began with the application of functional analy-
sis originally outlined by Emile Durkheim. For Durkheim, analysis of social
life required the study of ‘social facts’. In his Rules of Sociological Method
(1938) he suggested that it was necessary: (a) to find the causes of social facts;
and (b) to find the functions (that is, the part they play in establishing order)
of social facts.
The study of social facts required a search for antecedent social facts and
for the functions the facts fulfil in the maintenance of the social system but
they should not be reduced to biological or psychological components.
Although Durkheim was concerned to explain phenomena at the level of
society, the study of organizations would reveal the possibility of studying the
precise characteristics that produce consensus or social solidarity. These
would include the symbols, ceremonies, or rites of passage that reinforce a
cohesive group.
Just as Durkheim argued that religion was functional for society because
it reinforced the moral unity, various anthropologists such as Malinowski
and Radcliffe-Brown extended his functional analysis to show how order was
constructed. For example, Malinowski studied how the antecedent social
facts of ‘basic needs’, such as food, shelter, sex, and protection in primitive
culture gave rise to secondary needs such as the distribution of food, commu-
nication, co-operation, control of conflict, etc. These secondary needs were
satisfied by the development of language norms and rules. In this way early
anthropology progressed by studying how every aspect of culture was ful-
filling some function. A good example was Radcliffe-Brown’s study of joking
relationships. In ‘primitive’ society a joking relationship allows one person to
‘insult’ another who is not allowed to take offence. This is a relationship of
‘permitted disrespect’. Thus, to understand its function it is necessary to see it
in the context of respectful relationships. That is, it reinforces cohesive
relationships.
The sociological development of functional analysis was taken further
by Robert Merton (1968) who was critical of many functionalist accounts.
As a result, Merton qualified functional analysis and suggested that it should
be reserved for observed consequences of social events which enable the
adaptation, or adjustment, of a given system. Thus, patterns of behaviour can
be studied to show the functional properties of a component part to the
system as a whole. For example, families are said to be functional for society
by enabling the socialization of younger members, thereby creating stable
personalities. In this way, individuals become competent role players. Sim-
ilarly, organizations can be said to perform a function by integrating the
activities of all their members through processes of secondary socialization
such as selection, recruitment, training, and so on. Figure 3.1 illustrates a
functional analysis of organizational culture in which the parts are inte-
grated. The functional integration or fit of activities requires careful analysis.
As Merton suggests, functional analysis should be reserved for observed
consequences of social events which enable the adaptation, or adjustment, of
a given system. Patterns of behaviour can be studied to show the functional
Is the vision: Leadership Human Resource Management Control
Clearly articulated? Is it effective? Is selection and recruitment How effective are systems for:
Disseminated throughout Is it ethical? effective? quality, administration, health
the organisation? Does it empower others Is training and development and safety?
Demonstrated by managers? through role behaviour? effective? How is effectiveness measured?
Does it emphasize results?
Is the mission: Structure Teams Technology

Clearly articulated? Is the structure flexible How are dynamics assessed? What are the effects of staff?
Understood throughout enough for tasks to be How is project management Is job redesign appropriate?
the organisation? managed? carried out?
Managed by all?
Psychological contact Decision-making Core values Performance appraisal

What determines this? Who are the decision-makers? How are they articulated What methods are used?
A n a l y s i n g C u l t u re
How is it perceived? How effective are they? and demonstrated? Are they seen to be fair?
FIGURE 3.1
A functional analysis of organizational culture indicating each unit of analysis

67
FIGURE 3.2
The health of the
organism: the
functional fit
approach to
cultural integration
and the
identification of
dysfunctions
properties of a component part to the system as a whole. From this per-

spective managers would ask: what are the functions of each of these compo-
nents and how effective are they in achieving their aims?
For Merton, functionalist analysis needed refining in various ways. His
first critical point was to argue that not all practices were functional for the
entire cultural system. It was important to recognize that certain activities
may be functional for some members but not necessarily for others and it was
therefore necessary to locate the unit of analysis rather than assuming univer-
sality of function for the entire system. In Figure 3.1 the unit of analysis is
indicated by the function it serves. Mission, leadership, decision-making and
so forth are all functionally related but we can ask if each component is
functional for everyone. For example, decisions made in one area may not
be functional for another. Furthermore, we might see how an activity may be
functional for one group (for example, shareholders) but not for another (for
example, employees). It is therefore not possible to say that ceremonial
activities are functional for all members of an organization; they may well
unify a group who share one set of values but they may be equally counter-
productive to others.
The second critical point he raises is that not all activities fulfil positive
functions. Historically they may well have done but with the passage of time
an activity may have outlived its usefulness. Therefore some activities may
become dysfunctional because they carry negative rather than positive con-
sequences leading to the destabilization of the system. Merton’s solution is to
identify positive and negative functions when analysing a particular activity
before deciding if they are functional for the entire cultural system. In this
way, the health of the organism can be ascertained. This is illustrated in
Figure 3.2. A good example here is his discussion of the dysfunctions of
bureaucracy. In particular he discusses retreatism – when an individual

retreats behind the role rather than dealing with a problem identified by a
client or customer; ritualism – where an employee displays a rigid adherence
to a rule thus undermining the relationship (again it is not difficult to see how
the dissatisfaction of the client or customer could lead to dissatisfaction); and
rebellion – when the bureaucratic procedures themselves may lead to rebel-
lion or lack of co-operation from clients, customers and staff alike.
A third critical point from Merton is his insistence that no activity is
indispensable. Therefore we should recognize that for many social practices
there may be functional alternatives. The final critical point is his distinction
between manifest functions (those which can be easily recognized and are
obviously intended by the individuals involved) and latent functions (the
unintended and unrecognized consequences of social behaviour). Thus, mem-
bers of an organization may hold values that are counterproductive to the
organization. For example, a sales person may not realize that her non-verbal
behaviour contradicts the verbal statement made to the customer. We can
therefore look for both latent functions and dysfunctions when observing an
activity. In this way we can ‘look behind’ the behaviours and activities of
individuals and groups of people in organizations.
From a Functionalist perspective, an organization’s culture is composed
of a series of traits that combine to form a cultural complex of organized,
patterned, social relationships. A cultural trait refers to the smallest unit of a
culture; it may be a phrase, an object, a gesture or a symbol. When such units
of communication become patterns, they begin to form expectations and
behaviours that become predictable or normative. A cultural norm is there-
fore an established standard of what a group expects (or approves of) in
terms of thought and conduct. Cultural norms take many different forms,
some of which can be defined as values, habits, behaviours and customs. For
example, if we focus on values and customs, we can note the following:
1 Values are the deep-seated sentiments shared by members of an organ-
ization that will often dictate the actions and behaviour of its
members.
2 Customs carry significant implications of right and wrong. Customs
may change through both an unconscious, unplanned, and non-directed
process, or by enacted change which is planned and deliberate. One
approach to detecting an organization’s customs is to investigate its
regulative and constitutive rules.
This approach would seek to analyse cultural integration by asking the
extent to which people share the goals of the organization. This may not be
difficult to ascertain and may well be a valuable activity. It becomes much
more problematic, however, when deeper questions are asked pertaining to
employee commitment. It is possible that if the organization carried out a
survey of its culture in these terms, then it might discover that while people
understand the business strategy and corporate goals, they may give a
negative response to questions of commitment. This can be approached in
one of two ways. First, the organization regards the negative responses to
commitment as dysfunctional (which, of course, would be a dangerous
judgement) or, second, it accepts that people are committed to many things
which may on some occasions be aligned while on other occasions may
conflict. For example, in a large NHS Trust it is likely that all staff may
respond positively to strategy and goals but differ in respect of the values and
interests (financial, material, cognitive) they hold. This is because there are
many professional and occupational groupings in the health service com-
prising consultants, junior doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational
therapists, radiographers, pharmacists and others whose values and interests
are likely to be influenced by various factors such as occupational (rather
than organizational) interests related to the market situation or their atti-
tudes acquired through role socialization. Thus, when planned organiza-
tional change occurs, the various professions may act defensively to protect
their members’ interests.
The problem with the pursuit of cultural integration is that different
occupational groups rarely share the same interests or values except, that is,
on the most general of levels. The functional fit view assumes that cultural
integration is the central purpose of the organization. These ideas were
popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by Peters and Waterman (1982), Deal
and Kennedy (1988) and others in the Excellence Movement to emphasize
the need for harmony and equilibrium. Problem-oriented approaches, or the
search for dysfunctions, are thus characteristic of attempts to bring the
organization back to health or stability. The alternative is to consider the
limits of integration and manage the meanings that emerge and change over
time. This will be discussed in the next section.
THE INTERPRETIVE APPROACH: CULTURE AS NEGOTIATED

MEANING
By contrast to the Neo-functionalist views, an interpretive (phenomeno-

logical) approach argues that cultural integration must be viewed as
problematic since agreement is a temporary and continuously negotiated
arena of volatile social interactions. For example, some larger organizations
contain subcultures. A subculture is a group within an organization that is
related to the larger culture in the sense that it accepts many of its norms, but
it is also distinguishable because it has some norms of its own that mark it
out from the others. A further distinction can be made with the concept of
counter-culture. A counter-culture is made up of groups that sharply chal-
lenge and reject the norms and expectations of the dominant culture. Under
such circumstances it is common to find significant gaps between the reg-
ulative rules (the written policy statements and formal rules of the employ-
ment contract) and the constitutive rules (the conventions and practices that
often contradict the regulative rules). In this sense, the meaning of a situation
is potentially variable depending upon the values and background expecta-
tions of a particular subculture. Various writers have suggested that sig-
nificant subcultures arise from occupations within complex organizations.
The symbolic interactionist approach
Merton began to modify many of the issues that appeared to be problematic

in functionalist analysis. Another problem with the Structural–Functionalist
approach was the appropriation of specific metaphors and language of
natural science in order to investigate immutable laws rather than inter-
pretations of a socially constructed organizational reality. This was the
fundamental difference between the emergence of the various phenomeno-
logical accounts and the previous positivistic approaches. By comparison,
Symbolic Interactionism did not view organizations as problematic or prone
to dysfunction. Situations were imbued with flux and uncertainty because
they were negotiated by individuals and groups who managed scripts,
adopted roles, and consciously performed in skilful and meaningful ways the
motives that were not always apparent to observers. Nor was there a focus
on the ‘health’ of the organism. Symbolic Interactionism offered an inter-
pretative perspective that assumed appearance to be superficial because we
could not observe motives and, while this was not a problem for the
Positivist or Behaviourist, it was the problem to be investigated for the
Symbolic Interactionist.
The very notion of order was precarious and in this sense it was possible
to argue that organizations – the epitome of order in the modern world –
only appeared orderly to us as casual observers. Therefore if we really
wanted to analyse organizations, we needed to go beyond the façade of
appearance, simplistic observations and imputed motive. Research required
the analysis of the webs of meaning, values and motives created by people in
their everyday activities rather than seeking to observe a fixed entity – a
thing-like quality waiting to be discovered. Furthermore, if meaning was
contextual and continuously negotiated, then the focus should be the
‘fictions’, or artful constructions that people place upon their activities. In
order to do this, the notion of the ‘actor’ became an essential device for
understanding one of the key metaphors of Symbolic Interactionist analysis.
This dramaturgical analysis contrasted sharply with functional analysis
because it was founded upon an epistemology that explained social
phenomena more accurately.
The dramaturgical metaphor brings all public performances into sharp
focus. Therefore, to view all organizational activity as drama requires a very
different form of analysis than the discovery of functions typical of the
organismic metaphor. The dramaturgic metaphor by Goffman (1966) has
been an extremely useful device for understanding social interaction. It has
since become a feature of Symbolic Interactionist studies and the application
of ‘grounded theory’. More recently, studies in organizational behaviour
have began to explore this approach essentially because it provides a

vocabulary to explain the subterranean world of organizational activities.
For example, although we often assume that decision-making is a rational
process, it is in fact limited by incomplete information, psychological and
sociological processes, and the decision-maker’s cognitive ability (March and
Simon, 1958). We often assume that meetings exist to solve problems but
they may serve other more fundamental symbolic purposes, many of which
enable participants to develop their own strategies to influence the course of
action that best serves their own interests. As Bolman and Deal (1994) point
out, meetings as theatre help ‘individuals become clearer about their roles in
the organizational drama and to practice and polish their lines’. An example
of the drama metaphor is illustrated in Chapter 6 with the case study ‘The
graveyard of ambition’. This is also discussed in Chapter 5.
Geertz’s interpretative semiotic approach
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz is the best-known exponent of such an

interpretative exposition of culture. For Geertz (1975a), situational analysis
required ‘sorting out the structures of signification’ by (a) identifying the
various frames (actors’ strategies) of interpretation; and (b) moving on to
show how and why at that time and in that place their co-presence produced
a negotiated outcome. Geertz’s mixture of ordinary language philosophy,
Symbolic Interactionism, ethnography and cultural semiotics led him to
suggest that seeing beneath the surface requires ‘thick description’.
Analysis requires the skilful ability to understand a ‘multiplicity of
complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed or knotted into
one another’ (ibid.: 10). The analysis of culture is therefore the analysis of
signs which emerge from behaviour, artefacts and from talk. All signs,
furthermore, draw their meaning from the role they play in an ongoing
pattern of activity. Reporting on analysis may well reduce its complexity to a
simpler form in order that the reader may make sense of it, but such
interpretation should not lose its ability in ‘tracing the curve of a social
discourse’, by ‘fixing it into an inspectable form’ (ibid.: 19). Geertz’s refer-
ence to a semiotic analysis requires the ability to read signs and by this he
means the discovery of meaning in both artefacts and language. This moves
us beyond simple observation by requiring the researcher to analyse relation-
ships between motives, values and actions. There are two obvious ways of
doing this. The first involves the analysis of what the socio-linguists call
‘linguistic competence’ – the recognition that all utterances are tied to a
context. The second is based on a different approach to language known as
Structuralism or semiotics.
Geertz takes issue with versions of culture that view social behaviour as
complexes of observable behaviour patterns (Positivism and Behaviourism).
Instead, he urges us to view culture as ‘control mechanisms’. That is, as
‘plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “pro-
grammes”) for the governing of behaviour’ (ibid.: 44). The reason for this is
because, as Geertz points out, man is the animal most dependent on

‘extragenetic, outside the skin’ programmes for ordering behaviour.
Although he does not specify how to analyse culture, the most precise way of
viewing this is as a series of codes acquired when one enters a culture.
For Geertz, learning to read a culture is like learning to read a text.
Thus, while it is possible to teach the functional characteristics of a text and
the appreciation of basic skills such as genre, grammar and syntax, it is much
more difficult, if not impossible, to teach the art of connoisseurship. Sim-
ilarly, while it is possible to teach musicology, a musician will only become a
virtuoso by their own effort to understand and appreciate the relationship
between musical conventions and their ability to communicate emotional
and psychological qualities to an audience. For example, a musician may be
highly skilled but may fail to give personality to the music.
It is possible to provide a tentative framework for the analysis of
organizational culture. Following Geertz, the analysis of culture requires the
ability to read codes like a text. All codes rely on common agreement among
their users about both the content of an expression and about the way it was
expressed and communicated. In other words, we learn how to apply
meaning to expressions by learning the rules. And just as reading more
sophisticated texts requires readers to appreciate how various codes are over-
laid on top of each other (for example, aesthetic, psychological, emotional),
then an organization’s culture is not only layered with multiple levels of
codes, its analysis requires the ability of the reader to unpack and explain
them.
THE ANALYSIS OF CULTURAL CODES
At the risk of over-simplifying the message, there are three principal ways of
illustrating the cultural codes within an organization (see Table 3.1). While
Geertz does not explicitly refer the reader to semiotic codes, one useful and
simple way to apply this to organizational analysis is by referring to:
(a) conventional codes; (b) explicit codes; and (c) metaphoric codes. By
observing the combinations of these codes we can analyse semantic rules
which influence a particular course of action for individuals as well as for the
organization. Examples of semiotic codes are provided below, followed by
the final section on the analysis of organizational culture.
Conventional (dynamic) codes
Convention refers to unwritten expectations derived from shared experiences

by members of an organization. These might include sharing the highs and
lows of a common history such as a take-over, delayering, celebrations of
TABLE 3.1
Analysing
Conventional (dynamic) Explicit (static) Metaphoric codes
codes codes
organizational
discourse Type of Emphasises informal Formal and written Transformational
discourse verbal shared images. Symbols that
expectations carry new meanings
into a situation by
turning the
conventional into the
unconventional
Holistic iconography
giving rise to a rich
variety of symbolic
constructs
Language games play
with reality
Type of Narrowcast message Explicit with sanction Highly ambiguous
message Implicit/elliptical and transformational
language games play
with reality
Purpose To regulate the Regulation of formal Attempts to
expectations or activities transform meaning
concerns of ingroup Meaning is not through cognitive
Articulates methods for negotiable and affective
dealing with threats: Prescribes the attitudes, behaviours
aggression, exploitation, appropriate and modus operandi
negotiation relationships between Seeks to transform
Security against individuals and the relationships
economic, political, or organization Emphasises that
psychological Indicates what kinds of meaning is
deprivation (Harrison, controls are legitimate negotiable
1996) and illegitimate
The pursuit of one’s Internal integration and
own growth and co-ordination of effort
development where this toward organization
may conflict with the needs and goals,
immediate needs of the including the
organization (Harrison, subordination of
1996) individual needs to the
To challenge values needs of the
through covert organization (Harrison,
whistleblowing 1996)
To establish values
success as when a ship is completed in a shipyard. It might also reflect shared

experiences vis-à-vis managers or shareholders, etc. Such conventions will
give rise to expectations that people will act in a particular way because it
relies on common experience. Agreements made between people are usually
unstated. For example, most organizations have a dress code. While this can
vary according to the requirements of the organization or the dictates of the
manager, there are always boundary rules which distinguish the ‘acceptable’
from the ‘unacceptable’.
Perhaps a better way of explaining this methodological problem is the

phrase used by Umberto Eco (1965) in which he refers to ‘aberrant decod-
ing’. When a clear message is sent (encoded) to a discrete audience who share
the same meanings it can be seen as a ‘narrowcast message’ because their
interpretation of it (decoding) will be reasonably precise. However, if the
message is observed by a member of a different culture or subculture, then
that observer may not be able to understand the meanings that lie behind it.
Such a statement is highly metaphorical in the sense that in order to ‘read’
the linear expression of the message, the ability to decode the connotations is
required. To miss the metaphor is to miss the message. Conventions also
determine the nature of the psychological contract and, as Handy (1985) has
pointed out, this is implied, ‘usually unstated’ and exists ‘between the
individual and the organization’. In this sense conventions lead to expecta-
tions and analytically it is worth exploring this relationship to test the degree
of congruence between groups of employees and managers within the
organization. While Handy refers to the correlation between psychological
maturity in an individual as an expression of their motivational calculus and
the amount of effort they seek to expand in the attainment of a particular
goal, it is very difficult to identify, assess or measure it. By contrast, a better
way of analysing the psychological contract is to identify the congruence or
incongruence of conventions in the organization (see Table 3.2) between
conventional and explicit codes.
Language is critical to the analysis of culture. Key features include the
language used by group members about the extent of shared meaning and
common phrasing to describe group events and actions. Language establishes
a set of boundary rules in relation to the culture or subcultures to which
individuals belong. It does so by invoking particular language games (as
Wittgenstein observed) and in so doing it indicates both the cognitive
dimension of thought and the affective judgements of the subculture. As a
result, language not only helps to establish order, it maintains the emotional
climate (Mills and Murgatroyd, 1991: 37). Of particular interest is the way
talk establishes ideological boundaries yet it is common for them to go
unrecognized by managers and administrators as the cause of conflict in
organizations (Harrison, 1996).
Harrison’s work in this regard has been overtaken, at least in the UK, by
the descriptions that Charles Handy gave to organizational culture. As
Harrison observes, ideological differences are often a root cause of conflict
which ‘are recognised only when they are blatant and the lines of struggle are
drawn, as in labor–management relationships. But by then, the conflict may
well have developed to the point where a constructive resolution is virtually
impossible’ (Harrison, 1996: 150).
For Harrison, although the term organization ideologies is ambiguous, it
at least characterizes ‘the systems of thought that are central determinants of
the character of organizations’ (Harrison, 1996: 150). Thus, an organiza-
tion’s ideology will affect the behaviour of employees and this will, in turn,
TABLE 3.2
Analysing
Metaphoric codes Transformational language
organizational
games play with reality
discourse in one Example There is the impression that they walk Analogy with Bosnia is a
organization on water. I’ll tell you what it’s like, performative device that refers
ethnic cleansing. That’s what people to the intensity of feeling
say about it. about the lack of career
progression because of
merger.
A language game that exposes

ideological differences in this
organization between the old
and new management.
Example These new ‘change agents’ go around Ruthless Machiavellian abuse
to make sure they pump flesh and talk of power.
to the guys yet we know that if we
don’t perform then they’ll take my
head off.
That’s what drives the top cats.

Example If you don’t keep climbing you’re a Self-interest and exploitation.
failure. There is a kind of attitude of:
‘move to Malaysia or lose your career’.
Language is not a mirror
reflecting experience. It is a
social activity in which
organizational members
construct the meanings of
events important to them. In
the brief examples of an
unfolding story of acute
ideological differences career
progression is determined not
by a person’s experience and
capabilities but by
demonstrating the right
‘attitude’.
create a cycle of increasingly negative reactions between managers and

others. As a result, the organization will fail to meet employee needs and
they, in turn, will fail to meet the expectations of the organization. Fur-
thermore, as Harrison argues, ‘much of the conflict that surrounds organiza-
tion change is really ideological struggle (an idea that is certainly not new to
political science but one about which behavioral scientists have, until
recently, been curiously quiet)’ (ibid.).
Following Harrison, the six most obvious functions that an organiza-
tion’s ideology performs include how it does the following:
1 Specifies the goals and values toward which the organization should be
directed and by which its success and worth should be measured.
FIGURE 3.3
PRIMARY INTERESTS OF PEOPLE Six reasons for
ideological tension
1 Security against economic, political, or psychological deprivation
and struggle
2 Opportunities to voluntarily commit one’s efforts to goals that are personally
meaningful
Source: Harrison
3 The pursuit of one’s own growth and development, even where this may
1996: 150.
conflict with the immediate needs of the organization
PRIMARY INTERESTS OF ORGANIZATIONS
1 Effective response to threatening and dangerous complex environments

2 Dealing rapidly and effectively with change and complex environments
3 Internal integration and co-ordination of effort toward organizational needs
and goals, including the subordination of individual needs to the needs of the
organization
2 Prescribes the appropriate relationships between individuals and the

organization (that is, the ‘social contract’ that legislates what the
organization should be able to expect from its people, and vice versa).
3 Indicates how behaviour should be controlled in the organization and
what kinds of control are legitimate and illegitimate.
4 Depicts which qualities and characteristics of organization members
should be valued or vilified, as well as how these should be rewarded or
punished.
5 Shows members how they should treat one another: competitively or
collaboratively, honestly or dishonestly, closely or distantly.
6 Establishes appropriate methods of dealing with the external environ-
ment: aggressive exploitation, responsible negotiation, pro-active
exploration.
As organizations increase in size and their operations become more complex,

they experience conflicting messages and rapid change in many of the
environmental domains in which they operate. Harrison therefore identifies
six interests which are the subject of ideological tension and struggle. Three
of these are primarily interests of people, and three are primarily interests of
organizations. These are illustrated in Figure 3.3.
Explicit (static) codes
Many agreements in organizations are explicit. These agreements include

contracts of employment, mission statements, financial statements, quality
control policy, recruitment policy, equal opportunity policy, training plans,
marketing strategy, etc. These are the official rules by which the organization
attempts to regulate its activity. As such, these documents attempt to appeal
to logic. That is, they are codes which seek to regulate agreement because
they are explicit, defined and often carry a sanction. Meaning is not
negotiable since it is contained in the text itself and, whereas meaning is
open-ended in conventional codes, explicit codes are less dynamic and less
susceptible to change. Such codes can only change by explicit agreement. To
get the full flavour of such codes, it is necessary to consider Max Weber’s
concerns with ‘legal–rational authority’ which links modernity with bureau-
cracy. Thus, while legal–rational authority is the ultimate standard of
modern democratic practice, epitomized essentially by the rule of law, it can
also be used to stifle and wear down initiative and innovation.
Metaphoric codes
Metaphor is more likely to exist within conventional codes than explicit

codes since the latter seeks to avoid ambiguity. However, a metaphor or trope
can occur either as an utterance between two or more speakers or it can
occur as a product or artefact. In the latter sense its analysis is semiotic.
Metaphors can be regarded as symbols that carry meaning by association.
However, such associations are transposed from one plane to another,
turning the conventional into the unconventional. Organizations are replete
with metaphors pretending to be literal descriptions. Thus when we notice
this we can often recognize a style of discourse. For example, the literature of
change management is littered with descriptions of change as a journey:
‘seven steps to success’ and change agents are seen as ‘corporate navigators’,
‘riding the waves’ of change. Organizations are arenas where people do all
sorts of identity work. They define their social identities through their work;
they learn about gender rules; they express emotion and celebrate their
individuality and collective identity. The speech acts represent the things that
cannot really be said in literal discourse because communication is not open.
You can feel the power of this by asking what these people are doing with
language. Metaphoric codes enable people to do identity work. Because
metaphoric codes are elliptical, they can also express references to emotions
such as how people feel, how they define their social identities through their
work, their gender and collective identity. Metaphoric speech acts can also
represent the things that cannot really be said literally because communica-
tion is not open. To do so may therefore be dangerous for the individual (see
Table 3.2). Whistleblowing, for example, often reveals organizational activ-
ities that are couched in elliptical language. Gossip and moral opprobrium
often do this also. Metaphors can also be used in a more deliberate and
thought provoking way when they are employed skilfully as an intervention
strategy by the change agent. As a form of discourse designed to transform
meaning the change agent can enable organisational members to identify a
forward looking iconography through either the construction of images or
stories. In this way, a transformation in values, attitudes and working
practices can be achieved (see table 5.2 in chapter 5).
ANALYSING DISCOURSE: SPEECH ACTS, METAPHORS AND

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
The values of an organization’s culture are never transparent. While numer-

ous references to culture management exhort us to identify and change the
values of the organization in the interests of achieving a strong culture (for
example, Deal and Kennedy, 1988), it is often difficult to identify existing
values because they are underground. However, the analysis of tropes
represents one type of speech act which enables the observer to identify an
organization’s value system by examining the way language expresses the
continuous flow of experience (Tsoukas, 1991).
Taking discourse seriously requires an appreciation of metaphor as a
fundamental linguistic device for defining and enriching reality. Morgan
(1986), for example, has provided a framework for ‘imagizing’ an organiza-
tion through a series of metaphors. However, little has been said about the
uses of metaphor and tropes by members of an organization in relation to
their emotional experiences. Thus, the way the story is told by members of an
organization conveys a rich picture expressed both cognitively and emotion-
ally. As Tsoukas has pointed out: ‘Unlike other sign systems, language
possesses an inherent quality of reciprocity: it establishes a “conversation”
between thinking and acting’ (1991: 567). Metaphors convey neologism and
therefore make language dynamic. They do this by transferring information
‘from a relatively familiar domain . . . to a new and relatively unknown
domain’ (ibid.: 568). The most important aspect of metaphor, following
Tsoukas, is its ability to prescribe meaning rather than describe it: ‘Meta-
phors, similes and analogies, more than literal assertions, do not simply
describe an external reality; they also help constitute that reality and
prescribe how it ought to be viewed and evaluated’ (ibid.: 570).
The following criteria are offered as reasons to search for tropes as
expressions of feelings and values in an organizational context:
• Live metaphors are provided by people as substitutes for literal utter-
ances in order to express intensity of feelings and emotions in a manner
not possible with literal discourse.
• As live metaphors figures of speech draw out an analogy between
relationships by transposing values from one field to another.
• Figurative naming and classifying create a perceptual frame which guides
action.
• The analysis of figurative speech acts reveals the existence of regulative
and constitutive rules. Regulative rules seek to regulate interpersonal
behaviour while constitutive rules tell listeners the meaning of a particu-
lar reference. (Schall, 1983; Pearce and Cronen, 1980; Farace et al.,
1977)
The analysis of language, then, is fundamental to the view that people
socially construct their organization ‘in a process of ongoing learning by
narrating their experiences in ways that produce and reproduce dominance

and submission’, thus ‘the storytelling collective is a community of many
different and often opposed interests. The story builds up a series of alliances
and counter-alliances’ (Boje, 1994: 436). However, one of the reasons why a
discourse represents the way a story is told is that certain types of utterances
represent performative speech acts related to identity. Thus, for Austin, who
was the first to draw attention to the functions performed by language as
part of interpersonal communication, utterances may go beyond simply
communicating information by conveying a new psychological or social
reality. Examples include statements such as: ‘I apologise’, or, ‘I promise’ or
‘I name this ship’, etc.
Performatives are therefore very different from statements that convey
information (constatives) because they are neither true nor false. Students of
organizational analysis are therefore more concerned to study the effect of
the utterances on the behaviour of the speakers and listeners. Analysis is
therefore separated into (a) the recognition that a communicative (locu-
tionary) act has taken place; (b) the nature of the action ( e.g., promising,
warning, threatening, questioning, etc.) or illocutionary act; and (c) the effect
the speaker’s utterance has on the listener (is he amused? angry? persuaded?
etc.) – the perlocutionary act. While there are thousands of possible ill-
ocutionary acts, Searle’s (1976) classification into five basic types is useful.
These are:
1 Representatives (or assertives or claims) by which speakers commit
themselves to the truth of a proposition by affirming, believing, conclud-
ing, denying, or reporting.
2 Directives (or requests) by which speakers attempt to get the listeners to
comply by responding to a question, challenge, command or request.
3 Commissives (or promises) whereby speakers commit themselves to a
specific course of action by guaranteeing, promising, swearing or
vowing.
4 Expressives (refer to the affective state) through which the speakers
express an attitude by apologising, deploring, congratulating, thanking,
welcoming, etc.
5 Declarations by which the speakers alter the condition of an object or
situation by resigning, firing, declaring war on, etc.
Speech acts can represent a conflict of ideologies. When the organization’s
need to deal rapidly and effectively with change in a complex environment
clashes with the individual’s voluntary commitment to goals that were
personally meaningful, this can result in a conflict of ideologies, as Figure 3.3
illustrates. The statements in Table 3.2 reflect the conventional dynamic
codes as they are decoded by understanding the social and political contexts
to which the metaphors refer. These are restricted codes and can be con-
trasted with the formal elaborated codes of the explicit or static codes. The
performative utterances taken together create a picture of this organization
where senior management have emerged as the dominant victors of a
successful corporate take-over. The original management team perceive the

new team as a cadre of Machiavellian managers who ruthlessly exploit a
situation for their own short-term advantage. At the heart of this is the clash
of two ideologies – the old, very successful company that has nurtured its
development and is at the forefront of creativity and development, and the
new financially powerful corporation that, having made a successful take-
over bid, installs its own mechanistic controls and mind-games.
Organizations exert a powerful influence upon their members. They can
enable people to express their emotions or they can severely constrain the
social identity of individuals by placing pressures upon them to outwardly
conform to organizational requirements (Goffman, 1966). Mainstream
debates in organizational behaviour tend to restrict discourse about the self
to politically neutral agendas such as learning behaviour, organizational
socialization, or personality variables. Yet organizations are arenas where
people do all sorts of identity work. They define their social identities
through their work; they learn about gender rules; they express emotion and
celebrate their individuality and collective identity. The tropes represent the
things that cannot really be said in literal discourse because communication
is not open. The use of discourse is a critical element in reinforcing the status
quo or in enabling people to change their attitudes and behaviours to gain
ownership of change. Rather than seeing discourse as something that occurs
in the change process, it is more useful to recognize that change can result
from discourse. This is discussed further in Chapter 5.
This is similar to Geertz’s (1975b) description of deep play (which he
borrowed from Bentham), as play in which the stakes are so high that it is
irrational for people to engage in it at all. To express such an opinion
outright leads to the recognition that employees with less power are in over
their heads and risk too much by way of disciplinary retribution or outright
dismissal. In some situations, then, values are suppressed precisely because
they are more likely to be affective.
DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURES
Developing organizational cultures is controversial since it raises the vexed

question of whether organizational culture can be managed at all. Trends in
‘culture management’ during the late twentieth century attempted to identify
how organizations sought to develop cultures in the interests of organiza-
tional improvement. In order to understand this attempt to develop organiza-
tions through people management, it is necessary to begin by asking two
critical questions. First, why manage culture? This is essentially about the
circumstances under which we may recommend culture management.
Second, can it be managed? This question touches on epistemological debates
about the extent to which organizational culture is subject to control. Both of
these questions will be the subject of the next two sections.
Why manage culture?
Essentially, organizational culture was seen to be a relatively recent attempt

to influence organizations by suggesting that corporate success required a
strong culture. This was due largely to the popularity of the Excellence
Movement and Peters and Waterman (1982) in particular who influenced the
thinking of managers. As a result, organizational culture became the route to
achieve competitive advantage. A second source of popular interest emerged
from writers on Japanese methods of work. Writers such as Ouchi and Jaeger
(1978) influenced the ‘Japanization’ of Western organizations by arguing that
Japan’s economic success and meteoric economic development resulted from
their strong corporate cultures.
The search for superior performance therefore challenged bureaucratic
control (or rather the ‘rational model’ as Peters and Waterman called it) by
seeking to replace it with innovative, knowledge-based organizations that
tore up the rule books, focused less on procedures and regulations and more
on the development of core values. By doing so, organizational culture
became aligned with organizational structure and business strategy. Man-
agers were therefore encouraged to change their organization’s culture in
order to achieve competitive advantage by being the best. Since this repre-
sented the challenge to bureaucratic rules and regulations, it also implied a
challenge to the old Fordist methods of control: management by systems was
out and management through people was in. Corporate culture was designed
to replace management through systems with a heightened sense of employee
commitment and involvement by increasing the sense of collective identity.
The vehicle for doing this was the core values of the organization.
The argument that culture could be managed in this way is based on
certain assumptions that often remain unchallenged in the change manage-
ment literature. One of the major problems, however, is that culture change
is often viewed as the prerogative of senior management leading to old-style
‘leader-centred’, charismatic, transformational and radical change strategies.
New programmes such as TQM and BPR are ‘launched’ through the goal of
culture change. A number of questions need to be raised therefore when
considering the desire to develop cultural change. For example, if organiza-
tions are more accurately characterized as arenas in which ideas, values and
emotional loyalties are continually contested and negotiated (as suggested by
pluralists), then this raises questions about the role of the leader in attempt-
ing to recommend a homogeneous culture. The failure to recognize that in
complex organizations there are different subcultures which often become
the source of change through their very diversity of ideas may lead to an
unhealthy outcome (Meek, 1988).
Another difficult problem that tends to be glossed over in much of the
change literature is the extent to which values can be manipulated or altered.
As Woodall has pointed out, value change ‘is one of the unsolved mysteries
of the social sciences’, yet it is often assumed that ‘changes in behaviour
signify value change, and that formally espoused values will actually influ-
ence behaviour’ (1996: 28). This question as to whether culture can really be
managed has previously been raised (Fitzgerald, 1988) but remains a source
of some academic concern.
In comparison to the recent change management literature, Strategic
Human Resource Development is concerned to develop an ethical position in
the development of organizations. Woodall illustrates this ‘yawning gulf
between this and the approach to culture change in which the sole stake-
holders are the senior management team and the financial markets, with the
rest of the workforce unaware of what is being contemplated, and without
any say over their own involvement’ (1996: 29). She refers to the ethical
position of OD by citing French and Bell who point out that change agents
need to do the following:
• select interventions that have a high probability of being helpful in the

particular situation;
• ensure that a consultant does not use interventions that exceed his or her
expertise;
• inform the various stakeholders or ‘client system’ as far as practicable
about the nature of the process;
• establish the values of the consultant to avoid working with personal or
hidden agendas;
• observe commitments to confidentiality;
• avoid coercion by getting employees to divulge information about
themselves or others;
• avoid unrealistic promises made to the client in respect of outcomes.
(French and Bell, 1990; Woodall, 1996)
One problem appears to be that senior managers tend to see change as a
strategic weapon and as a result fail to develop the sophistication required
because they manage change programmes as they would a war game: by
‘identifying potential sources of resistance, monitoring where it appears, and
above all [by] “neutralizing” it’ (Woodall, 1996: 29). By exploring Brown’s
(1995) critique of the common misuse of Lewin’s process model of unfreeze–
change–freeze, Woodall argues that regular misuse occurs at each stage. For
example, at the unfreeze stage, two issues of integrity emerge. The first
concerns who it is that defines the dysfunctions. This is a clear reference to
those senior leaders in positions of power who may, either unwittingly or
deliberately, abuse their positions when they provide their ‘view from the
bridge’. The second issue is related to the first and refers to the pseudo-
science of techniques such as Gap analysis or SWOT analysis that ‘can create
the illusion of scientific rigour’ masking a ‘naive pragmatism’ (Woodall,
1996: 29). As a result, it is possible to suggest that critical questions at this
stage should include:
• the method of data collection;
• the source from which it was obtained;
• the integrity of the researcher/consultant to stay close to the data and to

explain any difficulties with the analysis.
Further problems occur at the refreeze stage when senior management seek
to install values yet expect the workforce to ‘own’ the change. These
criticisms, however, should be seen as dangers alerting change agents to the
sensitivity of change. Whether culture can be managed depends upon the
definition of culture employed and whether it can be managed strategically
from the top of the organization. For example, if culture is seen to operate at
a subliminal level, then it could be argued that it is the very intangibility of
culture that makes it inaccessible to manipulation, control or modification.
If, on the other hand, culture is expressed through tangible forms – that is,
through the artefacts, the rituals, and the symbols and myths of everyday
organizational life – then culture, for practical purposes, is amenable to
influence and development. A number of well-known authors take this
approach from Peters and Waterman (1982), Deal and Kennedy (1982), and
Schein (1985). Authors such as Beer and Walton (1987), Gagliardi (1986)
and Dunphy and Stace (1988; 1990) put the case even more forcefully by
suggesting that under certain circumstances, such as organizational crisis and
destruction and where the only option is change to survive, coercion may be
the only strategy available.
Drawing on the work of Lundberg (1985), Schein (1985), Gagliardi
(1986), Watson and D’Annunzio-Green (1996) have argued that there are
four common themes that emerge in the change literature:
• a reliance on the notion of crisis;

• the view that leadership is crucial;
• agreement that perceived success is important;
• acceptance that change constitutes a form of relearning.
A series of modifications by Schein (1984), Beyer and Trice (1988) and

Isabella (1990) to Lewin’s original work (Lewin, 1952) ‘identifies some of the
complex cultural processes likely to be associated with organizational
change. It thus provides a micro and detailed view of what may be occurring
in organizations experiencing cultural change’ (Watson and D’Annunzio-
Green, 1996: 26). Thus, human resource policies and practices such as job
design, recruitment, selection and socialization, appraisal, training and devel-
opment, manpower flows, reward systems, and communication systems
become levers for change.
Organizational culture is both a subliminal process and yet is amenable
to influence through the activities of change agents. Any attempt to influence
change may have positive or negative consequences for the organization but
this depends upon the ability of the change agent and on the demands of the
situation as described below.
FIGURE 3.4
THE ROLE OF THE CHANGE AGENT The ability to
influence a change
● To diagnose organizational problems
in an organization’s
● To identify appropriate stategies of consultation
culture will depend
● Process consultation
on the competence
of the change
agent and the
demands of the
situation
THE DEMANDS OF THE SITUATION
● The nature of the crisis

● Shared agreement that success is important
● To recognize that change requires a process of
relearning
Is culture change always manipulative?

At the beginning of this chapter it was stated that the themes identified in
Chapter 2 were, to a greater or lesser extent, manipulative in some way. Is it
possible, therefore, to identify any strategy of change that is not manip-
ulative? This partly depends upon the integrity of the change agents and their
willingness to be transparent by declaring their intentions and actions. But it
also depends on the desire of organizational members to recognize the need
for change. However, there may be circumstances when changing the culture
of the organization is the only solution to organizational transformation. In
other words, when change in behaviours, attitudes, values and processes is a
progressive force. In this case, the ability to influence a change in an
organization’s culture will depend on two things: (a) the competence of the
change agent; and (b) the demands of the situation and the extent of
agreement among shareholders about the appropriate course of action. This
is illustrated in Figure 3.4.
Cultural change cannot be considered to be manipulative when the
demands of the situation are recognized by all stakeholders and agreement is
reached about the course of action. However, there are two other situations
that require change interventions that may be prescriptive or, manipulative,
in some way. These involve (a) the need to develop a more robust safety
culture, and (b) the need to avoid the problems of workplace harassment,
bullying, discrimination or stress. Although these may well be prescriptive it
is not necessarily unethical to talk about managing cultural change.
The need to develop a robust safety culture

That changing the culture of the organization is the only solution to progress
is illustrated when safety is compromised by systems failures resulting from
FIGURE 3.5
Newspaper Rail companies warned on safety
headlines The Guardian, 29 June 2001
illustrating a Rail safety chiefs have written to 10 rail companies ordering them to take urgent
problem of safety action to improve their performance and reduce the number of signals passed at
culture danger on their lines, it emerged today.
Lamentable failures that claimed 31 lives

The Guardian, 20 June 2001
Charges of corporate manslaughter are being considered against Railtrack and
Thames Trains following the Paddington rail crash, in the light of a scathing
report yesterday by Lord Cullen which condemned the entire industry for
‘institutional paralysis’.
Air safety under scrutiny after near misses

The strains on safety and air traffic controllers at Heathrow are to be urgently
considered at a meeting of senior air safety administrators, it was announced
yesterday.
Maintenance firm guilty over fatal air crash

The Guardian, 7 December 1999
An aircraft maintenance company was found guilty of violating air safety rules
last night, three years after a crash in the Florida Everglades in which 110 people
were killed.
Nuclear weapons secrets vanish from Los Alamos labs

Computer hard drives holding some of the United States’ most sensitive nuclear
weapons secrets have vanished from a vault at the Los Alamos research
laboratory, in New Mexico, the US Department of Energy admitted yesterday.
How BNFL deployed dirty tricks arsenal

The Guardian, 13 April 2000
A large number of internal documents have been leaked from British Nuclear
Fuels Ltd revealing that the public relations department was involved in a series
of ‘dirty tricks’, in dealing with hostile ministers and MPs in Ireland and the UK.
Nuclear leak worse than first feared

The Guardian, 2 February 2000
Japan’s worst nuclear accident exposed nearly five times as many people to
radiation as was originally thought, the government said yesterday.
Sellafield shipment rejected by Japan

British Nuclear Fuels was humiliated by its biggest customer yesterday as Japan
rejected a controversial consignment of plutonium fuel from the Sellafield plant
and accused the company of being untrustworthy.
inappropriate behaviour, attitudes and decision-making. In such cases, cul-

ture becomes the vehicle to manage change in order to avoid disasters. This is
illustrated by the newspaper headlines reported in Figure 3.5.
Researchers in this area have noted that failures often result from
the social contexts in which decisions are made rather than simply from
technology failure. Issues such as perception, commitment, communication,

decision-making, analysis, etc., may all contribute either to errors or to the
efficient avoidance of them. When systems fail, it is often the predominance
of human factors that contribute to failure. Many incidents are too insignifi-
icant to be noticed yet over time incubate the potential disaster.
Turner (1989) has commented on the role of organizational learning in
safety management by attempting to go beyond appearances to understand
how organizational processes lead to certain outcomes. Central to this is
(a) the appreciation of the processes and (b) the multiple perceptions of the
organization’s members. Referring to the failure of socio-technical systems
Richardson points out that ‘Business disasters begin well before, and [are]
often distant from, the final triggering event. They also continue to generate
costs long after the catastrophe has subsided’ (1994: 44–6).
The other characteristics of socio-technical disasters defined by
Richardson include the involvement of stakeholders ‘who play a part in
either precipitating the disaster and/or in contributing towards its resolution’
(for example, the Hillsborough disaster) and a number of key players who
‘will “intervene” in each of the three phases of the disaster’, each of which
‘will inevitably bring with them their own “cultural web” ’ leading to a
potential for negative interactions. Consequently,
strategists need to identify and get to know those stakeholders who are
likely to be important to the effective management of each of the phases of
particular potential disasters since identification and knowledge of these
important contributors can then act as a springboard for collaborative
activity towards a more effective avoidance or management of potential or
actual disasters with which they might be associated. (Richardson,
1994: 55)
Elliott and Smith (1992) in their study of sports stadia disasters refer to
the cultural web – stories and myths, symbols, power structures, organiza-
tional structures, control systems and routines and rituals – defined by
Johnson and Scholes (1988). This draws out the subconscious shared
assumptions and beliefs that are often difficult to change because they are
‘hedged about and protected by a web of cultural artefacts’ (Johnson, 1992).
This has enabled managers to ‘confront the culture of their own organis-
ation’ and ‘to understand the difficulty of changing it’ (Frosdick, 1995). This
reference by Johnson (1992) is clearly about habits, cultural practices,
behaviours and attitudes and as such it deals with some of the central
problems of a safety culture.
Developing a safety culture is not the same as developing a corporate
culture since the former ‘must be capable of mediating between “best
practice”, norms of conduct and good order and, at the same time, create an
environment which is receptive to multiple sources of information, one
which protects itself from its own delusions and which problematizes
learning’ (Höpfl, 1994: 55).
Changing attitudes to workplace harassment, bullying,

stress and discrimination
Another reason to influence a change in culture would be to address the

problems of workplace harassment or bullying. Some examples are illus-
trated in the newspaper headline shown in Figure 3.6.
Changing organizational culture in order to deal with harassment is
illustrated by Deadrick et al. who refer to the need to prevent workplace
harassment by developing a workplace culture based on mutual respect for
difference:
We contend that a more effective approach to preventing harassment
involves developing employee responsibility for maintaining a harassment-
free work environment, thus developing an environment of mutual respect
where individuals take it on themselves to monitor and eliminate harass-
ment from the workplace. When harassment prevention is examined from
this perspective, the critical issues involve how to increase employee
awareness about harassment in the workplace and get employees them-
selves to enforce a culture of mutual respect. This type of organisational
change approach to preventing harassment is consistent with the current
literature on diversity management, which focuses on culture versus legal
mandates as the mechanism for change. (Deadrick et al., 1996: 66)
This ‘cultural’ approach to dealing with harassment in the workplace seeks

to engage employees in mutual respect at both an individual and group level.
At the individual level, developing culture involves ‘motivating employees to
take on “prosocial” behaviours that demonstrate respect for individual rights
and allegiance to the needs and interests of co-workers’ while at the group
level, it involves attempts to encourage shared understanding through a
‘bottom-up, joint problem-solving, approach to organization and culture
change’. This requires: (a) the need to recognize the problem; (b) employee
learning and development; and (c) evaluation of change effectiveness.
Problem recognition at the organizational level requires the need to
assess the effects of anti-harassment policies and procedures. At the individ-
ual level, it requires an assessment of employees’ attitudes and behaviours.
Employee learning and development involve ‘creating a desire to change,
soliciting input about how to change, and designing development pro-
grammes to implement change’ (Deadrick et al., 1996: 70). Evaluation of
change requires feedback about the effectiveness of the change effort in
relation to behaviours ‘that either promote or violate the mutual respect
culture’ (ibid.: 72).
CONCLUSION
This chapter has looked at the emergence of organizational culture from its
Functionalist origins and in its more popularized form through the neo-
FIGURE 3.6
Harassment victims are forced to quit Some newspaper
The Guardian, Thursday 30 August 2001 headlines
Alarming evidence of young workers being forced out of their jobs by the illustrating the
predatory sexual advances of company directors and line managers is revealed problems of
today in a report by the Equal Opportunities Commission. Analysis of employment workplace
tribunal cases over the last three years found that more than 90% of staff who harassment,
were victims of sexual harassment lost their jobs or resigned as a result of the favouritism and
experience. Most of the victims were young women who started receiving bullying
unwanted sexual advances within a year of joining the firm. They tended to be in
low paid occupations, such as shop workers, carers, office staff or factory workers
on shift work.
The boss’s pet

Favouritism at work can be very divisive
The Guardian, Monday 30 July 2001
For many people, the realization that favouritism exists starts in the playground,
the moment they twig that getting picked for the netball team has little to do
with sporting ability and everything to do with being friends with the captain.
Are you in their line of fire?

The Guardian, Saturday 10 March 2001
You’d recognize a psychopath if you were unlucky enough to come across one,
wouldn’t you? Don’t be so sure. The media may portray the psychopath as a
crazed serial killer – the stuff of nightmares and horror films – but the reality is
chillingly different. Not all psychopaths are violent criminals and fewer still have a
desire to eat you for dinner. Many are highly successful businessmen and women,
lawyers, academics, politicians, doctors and teachers. Psychopaths wear suits too
. . . in fact, there could be one in your office.
Insecurity ‘fuels job bullying epidemic’

The Guardian, 15 February 2000
Long hours and growing job insecurity have helped fuel an epidemic of
workplace bullying, with one in four employees saying they have been bullied in
the past five years, according to the first comprehensive study of the problem,
published yesterday.
Submissive worriers’ the likely victims of bullying at work

The Guardian, 7 January 2000
Conscientous workers who worry about their professional ability and are shy and
submissive among colleagues are the most likely to suffer workplace bullying,
research revealed yesterday.
Bullies add cost to balance sheets

If you were sent 42 memos in one day detailing your supposed faults and failures,
would you feel managed or bullied? This is what happened to Alan, a senior
manager, whose boss used this tactic to control, threaten, and ultimately destroy
his workers.
Human Relations theory of the Excellence Movement. Figure 3.1 encap-

sulates a Functional analysis of organizational culture. This focused on
identifying the normative characteristics of how well the various component
parts of an organization are integrated. Although Figure 3.1 identifies what
change agents try to influence when they seek to change components of the
organization’s culture, against this is the recognition that such changes are
not always in everyone’s interests. In reality, this happens only in rare
circumstances when the survival of the organization is threatened.
By contrast to the functional fit thesis it was argued that interpretive
analyses of organizational culture created more sophisticated insights into
organizational behaviour. These were illustrated in Tables 3.1 and 3.2 where
the ability to recognize interpretive or semiotic codes becomes a critical
ability of the change agent in coming to terms with the hidden reality that
creates the flux and potential conflict inherent in much of organizational life.
Yet, while Functionalist analysis sought the management of culture, inter-
pretive analysis has generally argued that culture cannot be managed since it
is not a component of the organization but rather, culture is the organization.
From this perspective, cultural control is therefore seen to be manipulative
and not in the interests of those seeking purely to analyse and describe what
goes on. This argument was seen to be wanting in three respects: (a) when
the demands of the situation are recognized by all stakeholders and agree-
ment is reached about the course of action; (b) when a safety culture is of
paramount importance; and (c) to avoid the problems of workplace harass-
ment, bullying, discrimination or stress. In such circumstances, it is not
necessarily unethical to talk about managing cultural change.
FURTHER READING
Organizational Development adopted the view that cultural integration is

paramount to organizational success. This functional fit thesis was pop-
ularized by Peters and Waterman (1982). Other texts, such as Schein’s
(1985) focused more on the cultural processes. An interpretive under-
standing of culture is illustrated by the Bolman and Deal (1994) text where
the reader will recognize the importance of viewing the organization as
theatre. Handy’s (1985) reference to psychological contract is useful because
it formulates the expectations associated with conventional codes and
Harrison’s (1996) account of ideological differences as a common cause of
conflict is worth pursuing. The importance of language is illustrated by
Tsoukas (1991) with his reference to metaphor as coded speech and Boje’s
(1994) account illustrates how organizational storytelling either reinforces or
challenges the status quo. Woodall, (1996) provides a useful reminder that
culture change is an intervention that requires the adoption of an ethical
position by change agents.
The emergence of strategic human
resource development 4
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Approaches to change
• The reasons for failed change programmes
• Change, world competition and the revival of the managerial agenda
• Critiques of planned change interventions
• The birth of Strategic Human Resource Development
• Strategic Human Resource Development: the triggers for change
• Strategic change and learning
• Four central characteristics of Strategic Human Resource Development
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
By the end of the twentieth century OD had developed a mature perspective

for managing change. This perspective had become more flexible than the
planned change programmes of the 1970s. It remained experimental and
forward-looking but, above all, influenced by interpretive analyses, it had
become much more aware of the behavioural dynamics that influenced
change. There is a problem, however. As organizations changed by flattening
hierarchies, downsized and delayered, the responsibility for change manage-
ment was passed on, down the line, to middle managers, supervisors and
team leaders armed with pre-packaged programmes for managing change at
a variety of levels throughout their organizations.
Prescriptive programmes based on half-baked theories, lacking analyt-
ical awareness, organizational diagnosis, and methodological rigour were
driven by the myopic vision of a garden pruned and maintained by managers

looking for a quick technical fix. Cultivating the organizational garden
requires more than a set of pruners. It requires the ability to develop its
potential through the application of imagination, appropriate knowledge,
skill and care. It is in this sense that the case for Strategic Human Resource
Development has now emerged in order to progress a more enlightened,
methodological, and ethical change management that puts human resources
back where they belong – at the forefront of the change agenda. Strategic
Human Resource Development combines three things: (a) an awareness of
the complexities of change management; (b) a desire to rescue the concept
of Human Resource Development from a mundane existence in the depths of
training programmes; and, (c) a refined OD perspective to provide direction
for the twenty-first century.
1 Approaches to change which contrast the Organizational Development

approach to change with programmed approaches to change. This
discussion provides the starting point for the development of Strategic
Human Resource Development.
2 The reasons for failed change programmes which explores why many
change programmes have little impact. These are generally related to
lack of vision and commitment, ineffective integration with other
systems and processes, and ill-conceived implementation plans but lean
production methods and a naı̈ve behaviourism embedded in simplistic
consultancy models are also identified.
3 Change, world competition and the revival of the managerial agenda
whereby the world economy became the catalyst for further rationaliza-
tion in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, there had been a revival of
the managerial agenda for quick fix solutions to quality improvement,
BPR and downsizing. Analysis of the trends suggests an increased
dependence on rigid training methods and an over-simplified view of
change management. Highly structured recipes reflect the six strategies
identified in the previous chapter although the degree of dependence
results from changes in capitalism.
4 Critiques of planned change interventions which challenged the rational
models of change produced by the Strategic Management theorists and
the client–consultant relationships of the OD approach. This highlighted
the need to pay attention to historical, processual and contextual issues
that inform the underlying dynamics of the organization.
5 The birth of Strategic Human Resource Development which emerged
from the OD tradition. Strategic Human Resource Development com-
bines three things: an awareness of the complexities of change manage-
ment; a desire to rescue the concept of Human Resource Development
from a mundane existence in the depths of training programmes; and,
finally, a refined OD perspective which provides direction for the
twenty-first century. Strategic Human Resource Development promotes
The Emergence of SHRD  93
a more enlightened, ethical and skills-focused change management that

puts human resources back where they belong – at the forefront of the
change agenda.
6 The triggers for change influencing Strategic Human Resource Develop-
ment which emerged as a result of two pressures: first, the new climate
of disorganized capitalism and, second, from the internal developments
and debates within Organizational Development. This general direction
sought to replace overt control-oriented cultures with organizational
cultures characterized by creativity and learning.
7 Strategic Human Resource Development and the drivers of change
which was informed by four debates that force us to recognize the
importance of pro-active change to organizations in the twenty-first
century. These debates are the contingency perspective; the labour
process approach; the flexible specialization thesis; and the strategic
choice approach.
8 Strategic Change and Learning which illustrates how new learning
strategies have been developed to respond to the increasing rates of
turbulence. There are four basic types of response: strategic planning,
emergent strategy, intrapreneurship, and strategic intent. These are
discussed in relation to four central characteristics of Strategic Human
Resource Development.
9 Four central characteristics which are at the heart of the Strategic
Human Resource Development. These refer to the need to see HRD as
business strategy; the need to devolve responsibility to line managers;
the need to replace the concept of training with learning and the need to
emphasize workplace learning.
APPROACHES TO CHANGE
During the past 20 years the idea of managing change has become part of the
received wisdom of turbulent environments and has often emerged through
commercial programmes such as Total Quality Management or Business
Process Reengineering. As a result, a series of change initiatives has emerged
that has tended to borrow fragments of the OD approach. This has had both
positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, it has made aspects
of OD more widely known. On the negative side it has tended to misunder-
stand and misapply much of the underpinning theory, methodology and
intervention practices of OD. These differences between the old OD and
programmed approached to change are outlined in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 is an over-simplification and tends to generalize programmed
approaches to organizational change as extremes on a continuum. Never-
theless there are differences which deserve a brief mention. By the end of the
TABLE 4.1
Comparison of OD
Characteristics Organizational development Programmed approaches
and programmed
Methodology Action research Task-focused
approaches to
Approach Joint diagnostic involving Expert
change
stakeholders
Interests Pluralist Unitarist
Development Personal and organizational Training
learning
Culture As analytical tool A variable to be managed
Values Promotes humanistic values Promotes instrumental values
Mode of Process-focused Task-focused
intervention
twentieth century six essential characteristics informed OD (see Table 4.1).

These were:
1 A methodology informed largely by action research – a term coined by

Kurt Lewin in the 1940s (see for example, Peters and Robinson
1984: 9–24).
2 A recognition that effective change required participation through a
stakeholder approach to collaborative action (according to Steadman
et al. (1996) the concept of stakeholders was developed in the organiza-
tion theory, strategic planning and corporate social responsibility
literatures).
3 An awareness of the political processes that either progressed or limited
change efforts and the adoption of a pluralist frame of reference in place
of the unitarist framework. The pluralist view of organizational reality
is founded on the awareness that different groups of people (stake-
holders) are attracted to organizations that satisfy their aspirations and
that because different people want different things from the organiza-
tion, ‘conflict and “politicking” are natural aspects of organizational
life’ (Nwankwo and Richardson 1996: 43).
4 The increased emphasis on personal and organizational learning by
contrast to training and as a logical development of collaborative action
(see Revans 1984).
5 An appreciation of organizational culture (Pettigrew, 1979; Potter,
1989).
6 An approach that embraced humanistic values (Cummings and Huse
1989).
Apart from these characteristics the most enduring metaphor bequeathed by

OD was that of the ‘journey’. The idea of a journey has traditionally been
viewed as a destination which itself is the very rationale for the nature of
change. Thus, Lewin’s (1951) three stages of change – unfreeze, change,
refreeze – reflects the essence of the traditional OD approach through which
a clear goal or destination is identified and cascaded to the organization’s
members. Originally the very idea of the journey depended on a linear model
of change (Marshak, 1993) which tended to omit the ‘untidy parts of the
process that did not fit neatly into Lewin’s framework’ (Inns, 1996: 23).
Today, however, processual dynamics have come to be recognized that were
not apparent to earlier OD practitioners. A recognition that this OD journey
itself has changed and that the new practitioners will be a variety of people
throughout the organization requiring the limited development of skills and
knowledge suited to their current task has driven the need for Strategic
Human Resource Development.
The differences between the approach adopted by Strategic Human
Resource Development and programmed approaches to change are listed
below in more detail.
Methodology
Strategic Human Resource Development is informed by a variety of research

methods from the social sciences ranging from quantitative to qualitative
approaches. However, action research remains the central approach and, as
such, it requires the systematic collection of data on organizational problems.
Since analysis frames the focus of the problem in the first place, we can
identify some of the root metaphors described by Morgan (1986) and
distinguish between those with explanatory and interventionist applications
(Tsoukas, 1993). Thus, interventionist metaphors (machine, organismic,
culture, holographic and political) inform our judgements about what needs
to change. Since each represents one aspect of organizational reality, we can
understand their representations as follows. First, for machine, we mean
control systems (for example, quality control, administrative control, control
of health and safety). For organismic, we mean open systems. For culture, we
mean attitudes, behaviours and values informed by a series of interpersonal
rules. For Holographic, read learning, and, finally, for political, read inter-
personal influence and control (or leadership) and organizational structure.
By contrast the programmed approaches of TQM and BPR tend to lack
both analytical depth and sensitivity to basic processes (contracting; data
collection; diagnosis; feedback; design/action planning; change interventions
and evaluation) of action research. The methodology of programmed
approaches is essentially driven by the task.
Approach
As a result of the methods used, Strategic Human Resource Development is

informed by a joint diagnostic relationship between the consultant or change
agent and various stakeholders in the organization. This enables the problem
to be understood from multiple perspectives. By contrast, programmed
approaches tend to see the change agent (internally this is the quality
manager or equivalent position and externally it is the consultant whose
expertise is bought in) as the expert whose role is the identification of task-
related changes.
Interests
Strategic Human Resource Development views the main activities of the

organization – the human processes – to be prior to the task itself. This
means that in order to redefine the task, it is necessary to redefine the human
processes. However, this requires a recognition that the organization is, in
reality, a ‘negotiated order’. This requires knowledge of the interpretive
approaches that underpin the analysis of culture. By contrast, the pro-
grammed approaches tend to adopt a unitarist position by assuming that
there should be a single source of authority and loyalty within the organiza-
tion. Because Strategic Human Resource Development views organizations
as pluralistic rather than unitaristic, it sees agreement between various
subcultures as a state of permanent negotiation. Since this is a central issue
for Strategic Human Resource Development, the skills and competencies of
the change agent are critical to successful change and the holding together of
federations of different interests. By contrast, the programmed approaches
tend to see the role of the transformational leader as the agent driving change
in the common interest.
Development
Strategic Human Resource Development sees its role as the development of

people and organizations. Thus, learning rather than training has become the
central characteristic of change. Individual and organizational learning there-
fore characterize Strategic Human Resource Development. Contrast this with
the many programmed approaches to change which, because they are defined
by the expert, are task-focused, unitarist and depend upon training to
cascade the downward flow of task-related changes.
Culture
There are essentially two ways to view the concept of culture: (a) as an
analytical device or (b) as a variable to be managed. One useful approach to
analysing organizational culture is the drama metaphor. In this way, the
social construction of organizational reality becomes clearer and we come to
see behind the façade of rationalist assumptions of order and decision-
making. In addition, the need to focus on discourse is a critical skill for the
change agent. Thus we learn to recognize that situations are ambiguous and
uncertain and in a constant state of flux. In addition, we recognize that
symbols become the vehicles for staging reality and creating direction. By
contrast, programmed approaches view culture as a variable to be managed
(Bate, 1995). This became, for example, the view promoted by the Excellence
Movement as well as by various authors on Japanese methods (for example,

Ouchi and Jaeger, 1978; Ouchi, 1981). This approach was also adopted by
various writers on TQM and BPR.
Values
Strategic Human Resource Development promotes humanistic values. The

approach to OD proposed by French and Bell emphasized empowerment
through values designed to facilitate visioning, organizational learning and
problem-solving in the interests of a collaborative management of the
organization’s culture (French and Bell, 1995: 28). According to Cummings
and Huse, ‘Values have played a key role in OD, and traditional values
promoting trust, collaboration, and openness have recently been supple-
mented with values for organizational effectiveness and productivity’
(1980: 38). Yet there are clearly tensions between humanistic objectives and
organizational needs resulting in ‘value dilemmas’ and ‘value conflicts’.
Unfortunately, this attempt to find a balance between more empowered
solutions on the one hand and organizational needs on the other, has become
a major dilemma for the OD consultant (Greiner, 1980; Margulies and Raia,
1990; Church et al., 1994). Nevertheless, Strategic Human Resource Devel-
opment recognizes how an ethical framework helps change agents perform a
positive role of facilitation. Ethical issues tend to arise around the following
issues: (a) choice of intervention; (b) use of information; (c) withholding of
services; (d) client dependency; (e) choosing to participate; and (f) client
manipulation.
In the light of recent trends including increased global competition,
downsizing, the creation of core and peripheral workers and the flexible
firm, Strategic Human Resource Development professionals have various
value-driven problems to contend with. For example, various writers have
suggested that current priorities of the marketplace, or of capitalism itself,
have undermined the traditional goal of a values-driven approach. In a
rapidly changing business environment driven by global competition, ‘where
downsizing is commonplace and productivity is often the number one
priority for clients, there is significantly increased pressure’ on the Strategic
Human Resource Development professional ‘to focus less on humanistic
values and more on activities which have a direct impact on the organiza-
tion’s bottom line’ (Waclawski et al., 1995: 12–13). Consequently, many
change agents and managers appear to be driven increasingly by the demands
of the global marketplace resulting in a tendency to concentrate on radical
change strategies.
Mode of intervention
Strategic Human Resource Development is concerned with processes which

lead to tasks. This is in contrast to many programmed approaches which are
task-focused. This means that Strategic Human Resource Development views

its role as a dynamic process of modifying patterned behaviour consisting of
four styles:
1 an initiative;
2 this initiative requires change to critical organizational processes;
3 these critical organizational processes influence individual behaviours;
4 individual behaviours impact on organizational outcomes. (Dehler and
Welsh, 1994)
THE REASONS FOR FAILED CHANGE PROGRAMMES
In recent years many organizational failures have been reported. One criti-
cism notes that many ‘popular trends in management organizational consult-
ing’ such as ‘business process re-engineering, total quality management and
the learning organization represent systematic methods . . . for responding to
and channelling effectively the forces of change. Unfortunately, the vast
majority of improvement initiatives undertaken by organizations, even with
the best of intentions, are destined to have little impact’ with success rates, in
some industries being as low as 10 per cent (Church et al., 1996: 98). The
failure of many programmes has been linked to a variety of factors such as
‘lack of vision and commitment from senior management, limited integration
with other systems and processes in the organization, and ill-conceived
implementation plans’ (ibid.: 1996). Other factors include the development
of lean production systems leading to a desire for quick technical fixes in the
form of recipe knowledge; top-down information flows cascaded down
through layers of managers; change seen as episodic rather than processual;
and naı̈ve behaviourism permeating the change management literature result-
ing in simplistic consultancy models.
The development of lean production systems and the desire for quick
technical fixes in the form of recipe knowledge have been cited as a reason
for failure. For example, Garvin (1993) has argued that failure of TQM
programmes results mainly from organizations failing to understand that
TQM requires a commitment to learning. Others have argued that: ‘Like ISO
9000, TQM has been oversold as a stand-alone package, and the high level
of failed programmes has led to a search for the “missing ingredients” and to
some disenchantment with TQM’ (Chelsom, 1997: 140).
It has also been pointed out that in such areas ‘failed programmes far
outnumber successes, and improvement rates remain distressingly low.
Working on style, improving communications and the like still do not seem
to be getting anybody anywhere. Is it surprising that people get a bit cynical
about all these quick-fix solutions and flavours of the month?’ (Granville,
1996: 39).
Perhaps the reasons should not be surprising. Reductions in lead-time,

the attempts to enhance services, cost minimization, value creation and stock
reduction ‘are all enticing business goals’ (ibid.: 39) of lean production. But
these require new arrangements which ultimately means that such companies
can only develop by reducing labour to ‘half or less of the human effort, time
and overall cost’ (ibid.: 39). Interestingly, failure to achieve the desired
performance is often seen as a failure of the task itself thus requiring some
new, previously unrecognized activity and is rarely seen as a deeper OD
problem requiring entirely different solutions of participation and involve-
ment. For example:
Good as these experiences may be, they should have made us realize that
applying lean techniques to discrete activities is not the end of the road. If
individual breakthroughs can be linked up and down the value chain to
form a continuous value stream, the performance of the whole can be
raised to a dramatically higher level. (ibid.: 39)
The third major problem is the method of the intervention with cascaded
top-down information flows, through layers of managers, resulting in prob-
lems of understanding and commitment. A fourth and related problem is that
change is seen as episodic rather than processual. A good example of these
problems is illustrated by the National Health Service which has undergone
significant changes over the past 20 years and provides us with some
interesting examples of change management from TQM, BPR, patient
centred care, etc. As Edmonstone points out, ‘Most change which has taken
place in health care has been “programmatic”, that is, it has been episodic,
project-based and with a clear and distinct beginning, middle and end’
(1995: 16). However, if the health service is typical of programmatic change,
it tends to reflect older OD thinking of top-down information flows cascaded
in a procedural manner through layers of managers operating at the level of
strategies:
Change programmes and projects have been seen to be distinctively differ-
ent from the ongoing process of managerial life. ‘Bracketing-off’, a prob-
lematic aspect of management into a change programme with different
management arrangements, has been seen as the conventional wisdom.
Taking place in large public bureaucracies, it has embodied and enacted
many bureaucratic assumptions. Thus, change has proceeded typically in
‘cascades’ from top management to middle management, through junior
management and then to the workforce. It has also focused on ‘infra-
structure’ matters (policies, structures and systems). Finally, it has assumed
(in a good democratic tradition) that change is best brought about by
‘normative/re-educative’ strategies, whereby individuals (most usually
through education and training experiences) are encouraged to re-examine
their values and attitudes, change them and hence modify their behaviour
at work. (ibid.: 16)
Another problem is the simplistic thinking that lies behind the implementa-
tion of change programmes resulting in a type of naı̈ve behaviourism. The
management literature reveals various simplistic consultancy models which
naı̈vely see resistance as problem behaviour. According to Edmonstone,

various assumptions are made about employees’ problematic behaviour.
These include assumptions that (a) individual problematic behaviour can be
‘isolated’ and ‘changed’; (b) the primary target for change should be the
content of ideas and attitudes; (c) behaviour can be influenced by altering
formal structures and systems; and (d) promulgating organization-wide
change programmes such as mission statements, TQM, culture change
programmes, etc. will be effective.
As a result, Edmonstone criticizes these by arguing that: (a) they tend to
focus on global and longer-term issues which are not always perceived to be
in the short-term ‘critical path’ of the organization; (b) they rely heavily on
education and training methods which encourage representational learning
(through acquiring a new management language, complete with jargon,
catchphrases, etc.) rather than behavioural learning (through doing); (c) they
are too often driven by an exclusive core group who are seen to be the sole or
main owners of the problem (and therefore of its solution); (d) such groups
are often insensitive to the history, culture and priorities within sub-parts of
the organization; and (e) all this serves to set up a tension between the
‘rhetoric’ and the ‘reality’.
CHANGE, WORLD COMPETITION AND THE REVIVAL OF

THE MANAGERIAL AGENDA
One of the major problems for OD since the 1980s appears to have been that
the world economy became the catalyst for further rationalization. In picking
up the arguments of Pfeffer (1994) and Argyris (1990), Alpander and Carroll
have argued that:
The global orientation that characterized OD was replaced during the
1970s with more specialized efforts at improving organisations . . . The
1980s witnessed even more specialization. Organisations focused on the
narrow use of single approaches, such as teambuilding, survey-guided
development, performance management, process consultation, action
research, socio-technical systems analysis, grid analysis, goals management,
and re-engineering. These approaches are by no means exhaustive of all
OD approaches but are representative of the most widely used OD
techniques. (Alpander and Carroll, 1995: 4–5)
A major criticism of many programmed approaches to change (from the
perspective of OD) is the recipe approach to knowledge and learning caused
by consultants, or change agents, who use rigid formulas for changing the
organization. This mechanistic ‘how to’ approach hinders the synergy of
cognitive and behavioural learning in complex situations for two reasons:
first, it focuses on training methods that are constructed as toolbox formula-
tions of recipe knowledge; second, it is driven by a small and unrepresent-
ative cadre of problem definers. Examples are cited by Werr et al. (1997) in
their investigation of methods used in Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

projects undertaken in five large consulting companies who developed highly
structured methods and tools for bringing about organizational change.
Their study indicated that there was no evidence of positive effects of these
‘structured methods’ on learning and that such rigid methods of programmed
approaches may support uncritical action because they are based on an over-
simplified view of management and organizations. As they put it, highly
structured programmes with recipes and methodological toolboxes may, on
the one hand, ‘create a feeling among their users of security’ but this can
counteract reflection and learning (ibid.: 305). The implications of this
research is that consultants transform a process into a product which
becomes their vehicle for engaging with the host organization. A second
problem emerges when ‘less capable’ change agents are not equipped to
translate the product into a process of cognitive and behavioural learning.
Similar remarks have been made about the more formulaic encounters
of OD consultants in healthcare organizations. In an account that criticizes
the reductionism thinking of many change agents Edmonstone and Havergal
(1995) have remarked that the healthcare sector has become ‘sanitized’ and
‘made safe’ from critical challenges. It has become ‘the terrain of the
problem-page agony aunt’ by promoting inappropriate people to the position
of internal OD consultants and by adopting the safety of the recipe book:
As a result of this, OD becomes a supporter of the status quo of conformist
innovation (incremental change within prescribed ideological boundaries),
rather than deviant innovation (concerned with reframing the status quo,
with the leading-edge and with ‘what comes next’). As a result, a multitude
of people claim to be ‘doing OD’ (a safe activity) – human resource
directors, training managers (who overnight become transformed into OD
managers!), quality facilitators, etc. This process is accelerated by a growth
in the number of ‘recipe books’, which, while helpful in demystifying some
of the more arcane aspects of OD activity, also portray OD as the
application of problem-solving tools and techniques . . . This newly-
sanitized and ‘safe’ OD creates a further problem. The OD function is seen
as the custodian of the softer organizational values – the terrain of the
problem-page agony aunt. Having provided satisfactorily a place within the
structure for such unbusinesslike behaviour, the rest of the organization
permits itself to become even less concerned with ‘people’ and the ratchet
tightens further. (ibid.: 31)
This can lead to the celebration of rhetoric under the banner of OD to give it
credibility. This is what Edmonstone, and Havergal (following Morgan,
1993) refer to as the ‘deer-hunting’ approach ‘where the trophies of the
multiple change programmes (BS 5750, Investors in People, National Train-
ing Award, etc.) are flaunted to interested parties’ (Edmonstone and
Havergal, 1995: 31).
While the authors provide seven reasons for the death of OD in
healthcare, none can be as culpable as the ‘neo-unitary revival’ of the
managerial agenda through a ‘whole range of management initiatives and
actions (communications audits, organizational audits, TQM programmes,
etc.)’ that ‘have all sought to foster a set of shared (market) values which
favour: a single authority source, general management; a single loyalty focus,
the employer, not the profession; common objectives, through mission
statements, business plans, performance appraisal, etc.; integration of func-
tions, through restructuring and team building’ (ibid.: 31).
CRITIQUES OF PLANNED CHANGE INTERVENTIONS
Since the late 1980s there have been various, albeit fragmented, challenges to
the older OD approaches of planned change. These are related to what
Pettigrew (1985) identified as the concern with constant innovation rather
than stability. This is clearly an echo of Burns and Stalker’s (1961) research
from a contingency perspective suggesting that organic structures require the
management of more dynamic processes. This has affected an increasing
number of organizations as they struggle to survive in a global marketplace.
As a result, the planned change approach has come under increased scrutiny.
For example, Pettigrew (1985) argued that while there were many issues of
complexity in the change literature in need of greater consideration, two
central problems emerge consistently to limit the literature on the manage-
ment of change. The first is the limitation of rational models of change
produced by the Strategic Management theorists who tend to view change as
a series of strategic episodes in which each element of change has a specific
beginning and a finite end. The second is the problem within the OD
literature to limit the diagnosis of change processes to a relationship between
the consultant and client. What they both shared in common was a ‘limited
frame of reference’ which viewed organizational change to be purely con-
cerned with the mechanics of change in an organization thus ignoring the
historical, processual and contextual issues that inform the underlying
dynamics of the organization.
Since the concerns expressed by Pettigrew in the mid-1980s there have
been attempts to address these problems by focusing on processes. The most
notable empirical examples have been Pettigrew (1985), Dawson (1994), and
Pettigrew and Whipp (1993). The emerging alternative to planned change
models has been dubbed the ‘emergent change model’ (Burnes, 1996b) and
‘processual change’ (Dawson, 1994). Dawson argued that change should not
be treated as a series of linear events but as a complex, temporal, iterative
and non-linear patchwork of unfolding processes, and Dawson and Palmer
(1995), noted in their study of TQM programmes into a number of
companies that unforeseen critical events during the change process could
serve to impede, hasten or redirect the route to change. Pettigrew and Whipp
(1993) also observed how managers had to make assessments, choices and
adjustments to change initiatives continuously which were outside of the
scope of the original planned change initiative.
It is clear that the critiques are increasingly influenced by the turbulent

environments in which many organizations are required to operate. In
relation to turbulence, Burnes appears to argue that where the environment is
less predictable then the processes will be more dynamic:
Although not always stated openly, the case for an emergent approach to
change is based on the assumption that all organisations operate in a
turbulent, dynamic and unpredictable environment. Therefore, if the exter-
nal world is changing in a rapid and uncertain fashion, organisations need
to be continually scanning their environment in order to adapt and respond
to changes. Because this is a continuous and open-ended process, the
planned model of change is inappropriate. To be successful, changes need
to emerge locally and incrementally in order to respond to and take
advantage of environmental threats and opportunities. (1996b: 14)
As a result Burnes has suggested that the ‘main tenets’ of the emergent
change approach are: (a) that it is characterized by a continuous process of
experimentation and adaptation in order to match the organization’s capabil-
ities to the uncertain environment; (b) that it is best achieved through a
complexity of incremental changes which occur over time and which can
themselves ‘constitute a major reconfiguration and transformation of an
organization’; (c) that the role of managers is one of facilitation not the
planning of change initiatives. This means that the focus is on developing a
cultural climate which ‘encourages experimentation and risk-taking’; (d) that
key organizational activities are ‘information-gathering – about the external
environment and internal objectives and capabilities’; ‘communication – the
transmission, analysis and discussion of information and learning; and ‘the
ability to develop new skills, identify appropriate responses and draw
knowledge from their own and others’ past and present actions’ (ibid.).
An alternative approach to change has increasingly emerged, founded on
a different set of basic assumptions to those of the planned change models.
These are:
• Change is devolved down the organization and results from learning by

groups rather than by the cascaded expertise of senior management.
• The focus of change should be tasks, skills, ideas and values.
• A solution to ‘a one best way for all’ to organizational excellence
contingent issues determine whether (a) the organization’s culture needs
to change or (b) whether to introduce change to fit the organization’s
culture (see, for example, Burnes’ (1996b: 16) reference to Schwartz and
Davis (1981) ‘cultural risk’ approach to change which alerts us to the
danger of under-estimating the resistance that may arise when proposed
changes clash with existing cultures).
• Organizational change must expose its ideological underpinnings by
identifying whose interests the change serves – shareholders, citizens,
customers and internal stakeholders? – rather than carrying implicit
ideas about the direction of change while remaining silent about its
potential consequences. In other words, whose interests are served and

whose point of view is expressed?
There is a distinction to be made between the more fashionable aspects of
managing change and organizational development as seen, for example, in
the difference between programmed approaches to change such as TQM and
BPR. The differences are related to methodology, approach taken, the
analysis of interests groups, the nature of development in terms of learning or
training, the approach taken to organizational culture, promotion of values
and the mode of intervention. There is a significant amount of literature on
failed programmes which appears to have some bearing on the approach
taken. Many public sector programmes appear to reflect more of a concern
to collect trophies than to engage in OD work and, to a large extent, this may
reflect the skills of the internal consultants. Finally, it is obvious that a
number of critiques of planned change have emerged. Various writers are
drawing on this literature and developing an ‘emergent change model’. This
requires more research related to differences in epistemology and approach
(all contributions to this debate welcomed).
By the twenty-first century, change has been seen as: (a) a process of
exploration where the destination is unknown (McLean et al., 1982); (b) a
continuous process involving the management of chaos (Smith, 1982; Wheat-
ley, 1992; Marshak, 1993); and (c) carrying consequences for other inter-
related sub-systems (Wheatley, 1992; Marshak, 1993). This brings into
question the very predictability of change. If predictability is challenged, then
so is the ability to control the destination. The more recent process-oriented
models of change enable previously hidden elements of the journey (uncer-
tainty, circularity, exploration, unpredictability) to come to the fore (Inns,
1996: 25). This approach has recently been informed by ‘alternative’ non-
Western perspectives, such as Taoism, which views the agents of change as
‘helpers, guides, mirrors, dragons, mentors and ritual elders’ in place of the
individualistic, hierarchical and control-driven modernist (Cheng, 1994).
This moves the focus of the debate away from top-down, destination-
oriented planned change models to a recognition that change moves in small
circles through processes that are hard to define in advance.
THE BIRTH OF STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE

DEVELOPMENT
The subject of this book has emerged as the logical development of the OD
tradition. Strategic Human Resource Development promotes a more enlight-
ened, ethical and skills-focused change management that puts human resour-
ces back where they belong – at the top of the change agenda. The journey
metaphor has already been adopted by the HRM literature although it has
been significantly modified as indicated below.
Human resource management and the journey of inner

commitment
HRM has been described as the application of OD through an organization’s

policies and procedures:
The overlap between HRM and OD can be interpreted in two ways. Both
interpretations suggest that OD consultants have significantly contributed
to the growth of HRM. First, it can be argued that it is inevitable that OD
consultants, as change agents, are likely to use what they consider to be the
best tools to effect change. Often these tools will be akin to HRM policies
and practices and this reflects the apparent similarities between OD and
HRM. The argument can be taken further in that many HRM policies and
practices could be seen as a subset of existing OD techniques, or that the
roots of HRM can be traced back to OD, i.e. HRM policies and practices
were available as OD techniques some time before HRM itself arrived on
the scene. The second interpretation of the overlap is that HRM appears as
something new and innovative and that it has a potential to improve
competitiveness. (Grant 1996: 193–4)
While it is clear that OD and HRM have similar aspirations because they
each share the same aim – to develop the organization through its people –
significant differences exist between the skills, knowledge and experiences of
the OD and HRM practitioners. For example, not all HRM practitioners
would claim to be knowledgeable about strategic issues within their own
discipline and many may not possess a social science or behavioural back-
ground. Furthermore, OD and HRM practitioners may not share similar
values-driven assumptions. Nevertheless, strategic HRM carries its own
metaphor of journey in its attempt to replace the old industrial relations or
‘trench warfare’ approach with the metaphor of the ‘wagon train’ symbol-
izing a journey of inner commitment rather than external control (Dunn,
1990). This approach is more concerned with rearranging the politics of
change than it is with dealing with complex OD issues. The attempt to move
the locus of control towards greater internal compliance (more enlightened
employers and more empowered employees) is due not only to political,
economic and legislative developments but because of the emergence of
increasingly ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash and Urry, 1987; Rose, 1994).
Rose suggests that the underlying causes of macro economic change are: (a)
the increasing trend towards globalized markets and multinational organiza-
tions which shift the balance of power from national markets; (b) the decline
of class politics and collectivism and an increase in individualized industrial
relations; (c) the emergence of an underclass and low-paid, non-unionized
work force; (d) the restructuring of organizations into smaller plants with a
flexible, often feminized and casualized, labour force; (e) the demise of
occupational communities and regional economies; and (f) the emergence of
a post-modern culture in which social identity is no longer bound up with
occupational communities but with individualized, consumer leisure
identities.
Human resource development
HRD has so far been seen as an umbrella term that carries vague and
multiple connotations (Garavan, 1997). This was even more problematic
because it carried different practical emphases in various countries. In
Belgium, for example, attention focused on training and development,
whereas in the UK the characteristics and language of organizational change
appear to be the central focus. In Northern Ireland more attention focused
on evaluation. In Italy HRD emphasized strategies and plans (Nijhof and de
Rijk, 1997).
In the UK, writers on HRM described the purpose of HRD as ‘training’,
‘learning’, ‘development’ and ‘education’ (Reid and Barrington, 1994).
Despite its lack of emphasis it was becoming a strategic weapon in maintain-
ing competitiveness in the international arena (Garavan, 1997). Some writers
concentrated more on the need to see HRD as strategically focused organiza-
tional development (OD) by emphasizing the turbulent nature of the external
environment and the need to concentrate on continuous change and develop-
ment (Church and McMahan, 1996).
While these debates have moved us in a variety of uncertain directions, it
has become increasingly necessary to recognize Strategic Human Resource
Development as an appropriate response to two things: (a) globalization,
world competition and the revival of the managerial agenda; and (b) the need
to move OD down the organization to line managers and other employees
who are themselves responsible for dealing with change processes and who
are required to engage with learning by doing.
Human Resource Development has lived in the shadow of OD. The
most promising search for an HRD model emerged from the contemporary
arguments between Swanson and McLean. Their images reflect a battle of
minds between a three-legged stool (Swanson, 1995; 1999) and an octo-
pus (McLean, 1998). Swanson argues that HRD is best conceptualized
as a three-legged stool with each leg representing a main foundation of
economics, psychology, and systems theory. McLean, on the other hand,
argues that this ‘simplistic’ model should be replaced by either a centipede or
an octopus. McLean’s ‘octopus’ suggests a representational model of HRD in
which the historical foundations are more varied than Swanson’s three-
legged stool.
What is important about this debate is that both Swanson and McLean
see OD as the central component, as Swanson’s retort to McLean makes
clear:
When someone asks me what HRD is, I respond by presenting a HRD

definition and noting the core HRD process: HRD is a process of develop-
ing and or unleashing human expertise through organisation development
and personnel training and development for the purpose of improving
performance at the organisational, process, and individual/group levels.
(Swanson, 1999)
As the debate unfolded, OD became recognized as a key player in a

Wittgensteinean card game holding some very promising cards.
The role of the HRD professional
Garavan (1995), who has suggested that two models of HRD management
tend to dominate the HRD agenda, has explored the role of the HRD
professional. These are: (a) the single sovereign model of HRD management
in which ‘the right and power to manage the HRD function is vested in a
single ultimate authority – the HRD specialist’; (b) the steerer model of HRD
management which requires the HR specialist to steer a course for equilib-
rium among the competing interests by forming coalitions. Because Strategic
Human Resource Development requires the involvement of employees, it can
be argued that the HRD professional must have some of the skills required of
effective change managers. These skills are invariably qualitative and require
knowledge of power relationships within organizational theory as well as
experience of those relationships within a particular workplace.
It is argued here that since OD sought to challenge traditional training
as a result of the Industrial Training Act of 1964 (Leitch and Harrison, 1996)
and replace it with organizational learning, HRD might be described as a
search for the mechanisms of the approach through the HRD specialist who
is able to synchronize personal and organizational learning with the organ-
ization’s strategy. HRD can be seen as the drive to deal with contemporary
issues in order to develop intrapreneurialism, promote a long-term focus,
instil a learning-oriented culture, and focus on high quality products and
services. Thus, Stewart and McGoldrick (1996) identify HRD as a specific
type of subject located more at the learning end of the OD continuum. This
is similar to the position identified by Nadler and Nadler (1989) who see
HRD as organized learning experiences provided for the purpose of improv-
ing job performance and personal growth and development, and Harrison
(1992) who views HRD as fundamentally concerned with developing people
as part of an overall human resource strategy.
Referring back to Table 4.1, HRD specialists are likely to be located
somewhere between the quasi-professional and the practitioner/manager
because of their focal concern for organizational learning. The competence of
the HRD change agent is likely to be more limited than that of the OD
consultant but will, at the very least, include knowledge of: (a) the organiza-
tion’s strategic direction; (b) change management; and (c) organizational
learning; the internal environment (its size, structure, traditions); the external
environment (organizational trends and developments, international and
national economic changes, technological change, influence of national
cultures, industry sector characteristics, actions of competitors). Like the OD
consultant, humanistic values are central to the role. The experience of the
HRD professional is likely to result from knowledge of HRM strategy and
managerial expertise with cross-functional responsibilities for line
management.
Strategic Human Resource Development has a promising future as a

vehicle to promote personal and organizational learning. Central to this
development is a better operational understanding of organizational strategy,
on the one hand, and an understanding of the knowledge and skills of OD
practitioners, on the other. Strategic Human Resource Development will
develop its true potential when it identifies its core knowledge and skills. One
way of doing this is to identify the skills and knowledge of the Strategic
Human Resource Development professional by focusing on the role of the
internal agent of change. The journey metaphor inherent in OD is also
critical to the development of Strategic Human Resource Development as a
form of internal organizational intervention.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT: THE

TRIGGERS FOR CHANGE
Strategic Human Resource Development has emerged as a result of two

pressures. First, the new climate of disorganized capitalism and, second, from
the internal developments and debates within Organizational Development.
This general direction seeks to replace overt control-oriented cultures with
organizational cultures characterized by creativity and learning.
One of the most recent images to emerge is that of the knowledge-
centred company in which personal and organizational learning is central to
the future growth and development of the organization. The knowledge-
centred company is based on the claim that information, knowledge and
learning are central to organizations operating in a more sophisticated
marketplace and with employees whose needs and aspirations are more
demanding than hitherto. For example, it is argued that:
One of the key characteristics of the debate on the evolution of the socio-
economic environment of business in advanced industrial economies at the
end of the twentieth century is the progressive emphasis on a knowledge-
centred culture in which learning is central to the survival and growth of all
organisations. (Leitch and Harrison, 1996: 31)
A major reason for this is that the ‘relentless change in market expectations
and the demands for new products have seen the gradual replacement of
capital and labour intensive firms by knowledge intensive firms, and routine
work by knowledge work’ (Tenkasi and Boland, 1996: 79; Starbuck, 1992).
Consequently, it is argued that ‘knowledge work involves the creation of new
understandings of nature, organisations or markets and their application by
a firm in valued technologies, products or processes’ (Boland and Tenkasi,
1995). While we can observe the nature of knowledge work in high
technology environments, various writers are beginning to comment about
the need to apply the knowledge-intensive/learning metaphor to all organiza-

tions because of the increased complexity of operating environments (see, for
example, Drucker 1988). Others have argued that the reasons for the
emergence of the knowledge-intensive firm will require a post-HRM solution
to the flexible organization. For example it has been argued that ‘to consider
knowledge a mere variable will keep HRM locked in increasingly obsolete
models of organisation, to the detriment of HRM practitioners and their
organisations. The evidence suggests that organisations are fast becoming
knowledge communities and HRM must broaden its perspective to keep
pace’ (Despres and Hiltrop, 1995: 10).
HRM, as it emerged in the 1980s, was increasingly challenged by the
demands of the knowledge-intensive organization, precipitating a deeper
consideration of many issues related to the flexible firm, including the need to
ensure an adequate supply of knowledge workers; the need to identify,
develop and evaluate knowledge workers and their outputs; the ability to
motivate and reward knowledge workers in order to maximize productivity
and enhance quality; the ability to structure the organization in order to
facilitate change transitions to new organizational forms (ibid). The emer-
gence of Strategic Human Resource Development can therefore be seen as an
organizational solution to strategic issues which include the importance of
new technology, the drive for quality, internationalization of business, the
need for more flexible and responsive organizations, and the supply of
resources (Garavan et al:, 1995).
Strategic human resource development and the drivers

of change
A Strategic Human Resource Development perspective is informed by four

debates that force us to recognize the importance of pro-active change to
organizations in the twenty-first century. These debates have not only
informed our history, they will shape our future. First, is the argument that
internal changes to an organization should be considered in relation to key
contingencies and from technology in particular. This is the contingency
perspective of which the work of Burns and Stalker (1961) and Woodward
(1965) are classic examples. Second, is the argument that change results from
the internal dynamics of pluralistic organizations in which different interest
groups seek change that maximizes their own interests and resist changes
that minimize their interests. This is the labour process approach. Third, is
the argument that change today is driven by enlightened consumers whose
insatiable appetites have forced organizations to replace mass-produced
goods and services with niche products. This is the flexible specialization
thesis. The fourth view is represented by the fact that organizations are
managed by key players (managers) who make decisions. These decisions
appear to be rational but that rationality is itself circumscribed by political
boundaries. This is the strategic choice approach (Figure 4.1).
FIGURE 4.1 Change driven

The drivers of by technology
change
contingency
perspective
Change driven strategic labour Change driven

by politics of choice process by interest
decision-making groups
flexible
specialization
Change driven
by niche markets
The contingency approach emphasized technology as the most impor-

tant variable in modern organizations. Success was seen to depend upon the
usual open systems assumptions about adaptation except that the organiza-
tion structure was seen to be determined by the requirements of the
technology. Thus, successful management depended on the degree of integra-
tion between the various systems. For example, between technology (as the
productive system) and organizational structure (as the management control
systems). Thus automation, which was characteristic of the high period of
modernism, required impersonal management control systems to be designed
into the technology. This type of ‘productive bureaucracy’ therefore required
the monitoring, rather than involvement of the activities of the workforce.
By contrast, the labour process approach challenged the assumptions
that technology, per se, determines change. Rather, organizational change
was seen to result from the attempt to control the labour process. As a result,
management control systems emerge as a direct result of management
intervention in the inevitable contest between the interests of capital, on the
one hand, and labour, on the other. Thus, whereas technology was the main
determinant for researchers such as Joan Woodward, researchers from a
labour process perspective, such as Harry Braverman, saw the key determin-
ant as control of the workforce with technology viewed as a mechanism in
this process. When new technology is used, it is used as a strategic weapon in
the struggle to maximise profit, principally through the deskilling of job
content and secondarily by the attempt to remove control over the execution
of tasks by workers themselves. The classic example here was, of course,

Fordism.
The flexible specialization thesis viewed change as a result of trans-
formations in markets and products. The use of technology was therefore
seen as a way of enhancing design and ultimately profitability. This approach
viewed technological innovation as an attempt to disentangle the unintended
consequences of Fordism and mass consumer goods by replacing them with
relatively low volume, niche markets. Perhaps the central assumption here
was the attempt to solve the adversarial politics of the workplace that had
emerged as a result of the Fordist work process with its machine-like
characteristics. As McLoughlin and Clark (1994) have argued:
According to the thesis, during the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century major economies such as the USA and Britain experi-
enced a shift from a craft mode to a Fordist mode of industrial organiza-
tion, based around the provision of high volume standardized products to a
mass market using relatively inflexible production technology and work
organization. The workplace characteristics of a detailed division of labour,
low-skilled jobs and tight management control promoted adversarial types
of industrial relations. In the late twentieth century changes in product
markets and production systems are stimulating developments which sug-
gest that a ‘second industrial divide’ is taking place. Here, in response to
the saturation of mass markets, and using the capabilities of new comput-
ing and information technologies, innovative firms are developing more
differentiated products for consumption in specialized markets. These are
being produced at low volume and cost through the combination of flexible
technology and flexible modes of working. Jobs are reskilled and industrial
relations more cooperative. (1994: 62)
The assumptions of the strategic choice perspective differ from the other
three perspectives because of its methodological orientation. Although
largely phenomenological, it originated within industrial sociology during
the 1960s and with the action perspective of David Silverman in particular.
Since then it has developed through symbolic interactionism and other
phenomenologically driven approaches to the social world of work.
The approach was effectively named by John Child (1972) who, accord-
ing to McLoughlin and Clark, made an important early contribution to this
social action approach and ‘introduced the concept of “strategic choice” as a
means of emphasizing the role of managerial choice, rather than technology,
in shaping work and organization’ (McLoughlin and Clark, 1994: 56). This
suggests that the major focus should be with the process of decision-making
in organizations although, as Child suggests, decisions may be informed by
any of the factors previously discussed by other perspectives, especially those
of the labour process theory. The value of the strategic choice perspective is
that:
it draws attention to the question of who makes decisions in organizations
and why they are made. This is a useful antidote to the perspectives
discussed above, which tend to portray technological change, and forms of
work and organization, as though they were independent of the goals and
objectives of organizational actors in particular cases. Child argues, in

contrast, that decision-making is a political process whereby strategic
choices on issues such as long-term organizational objectives, the allocation
of resources and organizational design are normally initiated and taken by
a ‘power-holding group’ or ‘dominant coalition’ within the organization.
(McLoughlin and Clark, 1994: 56-7)
Strategic choice suggests that an organization’s strategic choices are made in

three general areas: (a) domain (e.g. type of industry, market, competitors,
suppliers and, more generally, the limitations and constraints facing their
organization, (see Porter, 1980); (b) structures and systems (refers to choices
made about how centralized, standardized and specialized an organization’s
activities will be. Thus the structure may be organic or mechanistic and
decision-making systems may be participative or authoritarian, (see Dyck,
1994); and (c) performance standards (which partly determine the extent of
flexibility an organization has within its economic environment. For exam-
ple, ‘performance standards based on market share will lead to the creation
of market share data and competitor monitoring; performance standards
based on innovativeness will lead to familiarity with technological literature
and R&D; and performance standards based on reducing costs will lead to
the development of cost controls’ [Dyck, 1994]).
It is particularly in the area of performance standards where, as Dyck
(1994) suggests, unacceptable performance based on these standards may
lead to the old dominant coalition being succeeded by the new guard.
Taken together, these three strategic choices constitute what here will be
called an organization’s ‘strategic configuration’ and once ‘a particular
configuration has been chosen it is very difficult to transform and the
organization tends to experience extended periods of equilibrium’ (ibid.:
48). This has significant implications for organizational change since ‘the
only changes that do occur are convergent changes which are consistent with,
and serve to fine-tune, the interrelationships among the sub-components
within the configuration. Therefore it is difficult to add transformational
“sustainable development” to one component without transforming the
entire configuration’ (ibid. 48).
STRATEGIC CHANGE AND LEARNING
Managing strategic change has been transformed by the economic climate

since the end of the Second World War and three influences can be identified.
Up to the mid-1960s, competition was limited to local and national borders.
By the late 1960s and 1970s, many companies became more selective about
the markets they would invest in and diversified to enhance future growth.
Consequently, strategy became even more adversarial (Porter, 1980). Until
relatively recently the critical variables of market size and the number and
size of the key competitors in a given industry could be identified. During the
late 1980s and 1990s, however, globalization and the geopolitical upheavals
that have overtaken former communist countries have created flux and
uncertainty. Managing strategic change has therefore become a movable
feast. For example, Boisot has raised a number of questions about the
uncertainty of the future driven by new formations of capitalism:
Are we still moving towards a global economic order as predicted by many

strategy gurus, or are we reverting to competition in territorial units even
smaller than the nation state itself, i.e. the Crimea, Serbia, Moldavia,
Catalonia, Corsica, Scotland, etc.? Or, more perplexing still, are we moving
towards both situations simultaneously? Underlying such questions are
more basic ones. Of what strategic value is forecasting or competitor
analysis in the face of geopolitical discontinuities of such seismic propor-
tions as the disintegration of the former Soviet Empire? How helpful are
these analytical tools in coping with turbulence? (1995: 32)
Following Boisot, strategists appear to have responded to the increasing rates

of change or turbulence by adopting four basic types of response: strategic
planning, emergent strategy, intrapreneurship, and strategic intent (ibid.:
32).
Strategic planning, for example, is a legacy of the relatively stable past
‘when the environment was changing sufficiently slowly for an effective
corporate response to emerge from methodical organizational routines’ such
as the collection of large quantities of data ‘on a periodic basis from the base
of the corporate pyramid and sent towards the top for processing’. The top
then ‘extracts a pattern from the data that tells it what is going on both
within the firm as well as in the external environment’ then, ‘on the basis of
the pattern it perceives, it . . . decides on a course of action that is
subsequently transmitted downward towards the base of the organization for
its implementation.’ (ibid.: 33).
Emergent strategy describes an organization-wide process of incremental
adjustment to environmental states that cannot be discerned or anticipated
through a prior analysis of data (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985). A single
coherent picture constructed at the top of the organization is therefore not
available because the operating environment has become increasingly com-
plex with analysis and decision-making potential decentralized to meet
speedier responses to customer needs. Thus, ‘the strategic level of the
organization cannot act like an all-seeing central planner because threats will
emerge which have to be dealt with incrementally in ways not originally
foreseen by the strategy’ (Boisot, 1995: 33). One reason for this is that
the data needed for dealing with them will not necessarily be located at the
strategic level but may be found at any location within the organization. If
time does not allow for the upward transmission of data through the
prescribed channels, an adequate response to it may have to be formulated
and often in an ad hoc way, with the rest of the organization adjusting to
such local behaviour only subsequently. (ibid.: 33)
Intrapreneurship appears to be a strategy more likely to be used when the

environmental turbulence facing the company is high and when incremental
adaptation is not a viable option because the company becomes less inte-
grated and ‘threats and opportunities emerge that have to be dealt with
locally, but now with little or no understanding of how they may affect the
organization as a whole’ (ibid.: 33). The strategy is therefore a high-risk
solution in the attempt to solve the problem of vulnerability:
Here, of course, we are at the polar opposite of the strategic planning

process: not only can environmental turbulence not be reduced through
analytical means, but action has to be taken at whatever point in the
organization has the capacity and the willingness to act on very partial and
ill-understood ‘noisy’ data. With intrapreneurship, the world is purely
Heraclitan; all is flux and the top of the firm has no privileged insight into
what to do since any intended strategy it may have pursued has all but been
submerged. Of necessity, then, the firm must decentralize and operate as a
loosely coupled system. Intrapreneurship can only be effective where the
opportunistic behaviour it requires of particular individuals can be placed
at the service of the firm as well as those individuals themselves. This is not
always easy to achieve since an equitable matching of risks and rewards
between individuals and firms cannot be ensured. Often intrapreneurship
works at the expense of the firms that try to foster it. It requires a degree of
trust between the players that cannot be taken for granted and that is
continuously being placed under strain by the very turbulence for which it
is designed to compensate. (ibid.: 35)
Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence ‘through a

direct, intuitive understanding, emanating from the top of a firm and guiding
its efforts’ (ibid.: 36). Thus because a turbulent environment ‘cannot be
tamed by rational analysis alone . . . it does not follow that a firm’s adaptive
response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting
opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship’.
Strategic intent relies on an ‘intuitively formed pattern or gestalt – some
would call it a vision – to give it unity and coherence’ (ibid.). Strategic intent
creates a potential solution by enabling all employees to identify with the
vision or mental image of an intended future state. This appears to be more
like a process of corporate benchmarking in order to develop the company at
the expense of the opposition (Hamel and Prahalad, 1989).
The major benefit of this strategy appears to be the coherence given to
the image and the energy employed by employees to bring about the changes
to corporate strategy:
To counter the centrifugal tendencies that plague the decentralized intra-

preneurial firm, the one operating in a regime of strategic intent can use a
common vision to keep the behaviour of its employees aligned with a
common purpose when it decentralizes in response to turbulence. Intended
strategy then gets realized in spite of any turbulence. It succeeds by
remaining simple and intelligible and by avoiding a level of detail that
might quickly be rendered obsolete by events. (Boisot, 1995: 37)
FOUR CENTRAL CHARACTERISTICS OF STRATEGIC HUMAN

RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT
At the heart of the Strategic Human Resource Development approach are

four main characteristics. First, is the need to see HRD as business strategy.
Second is the need to devolve responsibility to line managers. Third, is the
need to replace the concept of training with learning. Fourth, is the need to
emphasize workplace learning, see Figure 4.2.
Strategic human resource development as a strategic

intervention
Strategic Human Resource Development views the development of human

resources as a strategic advantage. Through business strategy both organiza-
tional and employee development are facilitated. Organizational change is
driven at three levels: at the organizational, at the group and at the individual
level. However, Strategic Human Resource Development does not just reflect
the strategy of senior managers. Senior managers may be informed equally by
the internal development of products or of service design. This means that
the mission may be influenced as much by internal developments from teams
or from individuals as much as, or perhaps more than, by external market
trends. The role of senior management is to extract a pattern from the data
to ascertain the internal and external drivers for change. Then, on the basis
of the pattern detected, to decide on a course of action. The strategic level of
the organization can no longer act as an all-seeing central planner because
threats will emerge which have to be dealt with incrementally in ways not
originally foreseen by the strategy.
Devolved responsibility to line managers
Line managers are required to facilitate change by developing individuals and

teams. This necessitates the development of key skills, the acquisition of
appropriate knowledge, and the ability to be driven by values and an ethical
responsibility. Each is reinforced by their application to the workplace. As
facilitators in the development of their staff, line managers are required to
stimulate and develop creativity either as mentors or as change agents. This is
a pro-active organization-wide process of incremental adjustment. It requires
decentralized decision making to meet speedier responses to customer needs.
Where time does not permit the upward transmission of data, then ad hoc
adjustments will have to be made with information passed on subsequently
to inform changes to strategy.
116
Intrapreneurship
Creating an environment for
Strategic Intent
critical thinking through
Work-based learning must Work-based
forums designed to enhance
not be tied to adaptations organizational learning
creativity and challenge
to existing strategy. It conventional wisdom.
requires the development of Replace training
intuition combined with a with learning
mental image of a future
state. Devolved
responsibilty
to line managers
Emergent Strategy
Strategic Planning Organization-wide process
Role: to extract a pattern SHRD as of incremental adjustment.
from the data to ascertain strategic Decentralized decision-
the internal and external intervention making to meet speedier
drivers for change. Then, on responses to customer needs.
the basis of the pattern Where time does not permit
detected to decide on a the upward transmission of
course of action. The data, then ad hoc
strategic level of the adjustments have to be
organization can no longer made with information
act as an all-seeing central passed on subsequently to
planner because threats will inform changes to strategy.
emerge which have to be
dealt with incrementally in
ways not originally foreseen
by the strategy.
FIGURE 4.2
The four central characteristics of Strategic Human Resource Development
Replacing training with learning
Learning, in this sense, is required to go beyond the passive stimulus and

response principles of training programmes. It follows from the previous
point that the development of the imagination, the intellect and the collective
synergy of groups or teams will be focused on creativity. This will occur
either as new product or service design or as creative problem-solving. The
most important criterion is the need to challenge the conventional wisdom.
By its nature this will involve many experimental ideas to fire up the intellect
and the imagination.
Work-based organizational learning
Work-based learning (WBL) is already central to HRD. However, a much

greater emphasis is needed on the development of organizational learning.
That is, on the continuous development of processes and activities within the
organization. At the very least the idea of development would require the
establishment of a culture of creativity. Work-based learning must not be tied
to adaptations of existing strategy. It requires the development of intuition
combined with a mental image of a future state.
The skills, competence and knowledge of the strategic

human resource development practitioner
The skills, competence and knowledge of the Strategic Human Resource

Development practitioner will depend upon the place the SHRD practitioner
occupies in the organization. As facilitators, they will have received pro-
fessional knowledge and training in behavioural/organizational science
(including group dynamics, decision-making, and communications) and have
come to specialize in the application of creative solutions to knowledge and
techniques in order to develop pro-active change. By contrast, line managers
are more likely to acquire these in a more piecemeal way as a result of the
tasks they are required to oversee. Some organizations will seek to develop
line managers by rotating them into a variety of roles so that they can gain
skills and experience needed for higher-level management positions. Table
4.2 illustrates how these differences may occur although it is clear that there
is a minimum level of awareness required by line managers.
CONCLUSION
Strategic Human Resource Development has emerged to advance a more

enlightened, methodological, ethical and skills-focused change management
that puts human resources back where they belong – at the top of the change
TABLE 4.2
The skills,
Strategic HRD
competence and
professional Line manager
knowledge of the SKILLS
Strategic Human Process consultation *
Resource Diagnostic *
Development Intrapersonal * *
practitioner Interpersonal * *
Presentational * *
Research methods *
Analytical * *
Problem solving * *
KNOWLEDGE
Organizational development * *
Organizational behaviour *
Methodological *
Data collection *
Organizational trends and developments *
VALUES AND ETHICS
Humanistic * *
Ethical * *
EXPERIENCE
Organizational * *
Strategic/managerial * *
Cross-functional * *
agenda. Strategic Human Resource Development is defined by three things.

First, it recognizes the complexities of change management. In particular,
that change does not simply result from a linear and cascaded top-down
strategy. Indeed, it may be developed as much from within the organization
as from the pressure of external forces. Second, it seeks to reposition the
HRD perspective by rescuing it from a confused and mundane existence in
the depths of training programmes. Finally, it results from a refined OD
perspective which provides direction for the twenty-first century.
Strategic Human Resource Development can be distinguished by four
main characteristics: a focus on the organization’s business strategy; respons-
ibility devolved to line managers; an employee-centred approach to learning
embracing employees and managers alike; and an emphasis on workplace
learning. Strategic Human Resource Development focuses on the develop-
ment of personal skills and learning in order to achieve personal and
organizational transformation.
FURTHER READING
The classic text on change is Lewin's (1952) three stages of change which
reflects the essence of the traditional OD approach. Cummings and Worley
(1997) is a useful and practical text on traditional Organizational Develop-
ment and change and the text by Hamlin et al. (2001) provides practitioners
and change agents with a reflective guide through the practice today.
Reasons for failure have been described by Church et al. (1996) and
Edmonstone and Havergal (1995) provide an interesting account of how
critical challenges are removed from change programmes. Pettigrew’s (1985)
account of change at ICI has become a classic and Dawson’s (1994; 2002)
processual approach illustrates the difficulties of strategic planning. The
origins of Human Resource Development can be found in the controversial
debate between Swanson (1995; 1999) and McLean (1998). The develop-
ment of knowledge-intensive firms and the implications for managing
knowledge work are described in Tenkasi and Boland’s (1996) text. To
understand the importance of emergent strategy vis-à-vis and organization-
wide incremental adjustment, the work of Mintzberg and Waters (1985) is
useful.
5 Consultants, clients and change agents
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• The nature of consultancy
• Strategic Human Resource Development and the role of the change
agent
• Using diagnostic techniques
• Turning data into knowledge
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
Since the late 1980s, there have been various attempts to address the
dominance of rational, linear, planned OD approaches to change. The more
recent focus on processual and emergent change is intended to draw atten-
tion to the routine issues – the attitudes, behaviours, actions and the
unintended consequences of previous actions which are influenced by the
history and by the internal politics of the organization – which determine the
effective management of change. Furthermore, as organizations struggle to
survive in a global marketplace, it is necessary to move away from viewing
change as (a) a series of strategic episodes (the Strategic Management
approach) and (b) a limited diagnostic relationship between the consultant
and individual client. If processes informing internal dynamics have been
paid particular attention in the recent change literature, as indicated in
Chapter 4, then the dynamics of decision-making and employee involvement
have forced change agents to appreciate the views of internal stakeholders.
The most important aspect of the processual approach, however, is the
recognition that change, borne of imagination and creative thinking, can
Consultants, Clients and Change Agents  121
FIGURE 5.1
HISTORICAL ISSUES Historical,
may include: processual and
contextual issues
How change was managed in the past.
How management control had been exercised.
The design of the organization.
The decision-making process.
The growth of the organization.
The development of leadership.
The nature and extent of employee and management development.
The history of employee/management relationships.
PROCESSUAL ISSUES
may include:
• The extent to which change is proactive, driven by intrapreneurial actions,

group learning and is devolved.
• The extent to which expertise is devolved through SHRD concentrating on
the continuous development of tasks, skills and ideas.
• The ability to evaluate whether the organization’s culture needs to change or
whether to introduce change to fit the organization’s culture.
• Continually defining organizational reality by tuning in to different
ideological arguments by identifying whose interests the change serves –
shareholders, citizens, customers and internal stakeholders?
CONTEXTUAL ISSUES
may include:
The politics of the organization: for example, how change has been managed; the
nature of management control.
The leadership or management style: for example, participative or confrontational
styles.
The extent of employee involvement: for example, the degree to which decision-
making is devolved; the extent to which social relationships are built around team
needs and the collective accomplishment of tasks; the ability to redesign jobs.
Mechanisms for managing change: for example, decision-making, employee and
management development, creative thinking.
emerge from within the organization. I refer to this as pro-active change and
it is the subject of Strategic Human Resource Development. It is contrasted
to reactive change – the planned approaches – which are led by senior
managers who react to changes in the external environment or are seeking
out dysfunctions within existing practices, and informed often by manage-
ment consultants. Pro-active change seeks to develop enterprise within the
organization through human resources. It is strategic because it is informed
not only by existing strategy but also informs changes to the strategy of the
organization. This was illustrated by Figure 4.2.
Strategic Human Resource Development requires an understanding of
organizational dynamics. Change agents must focus on the historical, pro-
cessual and contextual issues that inform change (see Figure 5.1). The ability
to analyse situations, mobilize commitment, and establish mechanisms for

change requires the expertise of the change agent. Seen this way, change now
becomes a learning process because it seeks to facilitate individual learning,
group or team learning and organizational learning.
1 The nature of management consultancy which suggests that manage-

ment consultants package their products to overcome the perceived
intangibility of the consultancy service. By re-defining it as a product
they are also able to build in a situation of client dependency.
2 Strategic Human Resource Development and the role of the change
agent which is contrasted with management consultancy. It is argued
that Strategic Human Resource Development, like OD consultancy, has
no such pretensions to be neutral and recognizes the inevitability of a
values-driven position. By contrast to management consultancy, Stra-
tegic Human Resource Development seeks to develop competencies
within the organization rather than to package the expert’s product.
3 Using diagnostic techniques which looks at process consultation and
argues that being a consultant or change agent involves employing
diagnostic techniques. Process consultation requires the change agent to
engage employees in joint diagnosis by asking questions in order to
identify the appropriate type of intervention. In addition, the consultant
has to decide on the depth of the intervention.
4 Turning data into knowledge which argues for the need to search for
appropriate data by applying a theoretical frame of reference. This is
discussed in relation to four metaphors: the machine, organism, drama
and discourse.
THE NATURE OF CONSULTANCY
Management consultancy: building a product base by

creating dependency
In Chapter 4 it was argued that some aspects of organizational development

had been sanitized and made safe from critical challenges by the role of the
consultant. This meant that the mechanics of change are often manipulated
by unskilled change agents who adopt the safety of the recipe book by
applying problem-solving tools and techniques (Edmonstone and Havergal,
1995) and fail to pay sufficient attention to the processes of change. The
result has often meant that internal and external consultants become either
problem-page agony aunts while managers become ratchet tighteners. By
2002 the willingness of the employees to commit to change appears to have
decreased in many organizations. Reasons often cited for this have been a
‘change weariness syndrome’ as employees are exposed to ‘multiple transi-

tions’ resulting from Business Process Reengineering, TQM, downsizing,
changes in strategy and other transitions (Marks, 1997: 268).
Turbulent environments have forced external management consultants
to offer their services as a product. This, in turn, increases the dependency of
managers on an external consultant. The ability to construct and sell ‘expert’
packages to organizations invariably creates a state of dependency with
management consultants showing the way through the guide book. The
tendency in recent years to become increasingly dependent on expertise sold
as if it was a product is explained by Burgundy:
In particular I am concerned that the relationship between managers and

consultants has changed. As managers have been forced to face an increas-
ingly turbulent and capricious business environment, they have come to
rely, more and more, on the advice and guidance of management con-
sultants. For example, we have seen managers turning to consultants for
advice on issues such as total quality management (TQM), ‘reengineering’
and empowerment, to name but a few. Yet with management increasingly
reliant on consultants for advice, innovation and support, the traditional
relationship between power broker and messenger seems to have flipped so
that nowadays it seems that the consultants are the key power brokers in
the relationship with the result that the messengers now shoot the man-
agers. (1996: 28)
In recent years, for example, McKinsey sold its BPR consultancy product as
‘core process redesign’. The Boston Consulting Group sold its product of
‘time-based management’ (TBM). Ernst & Young sold their product of BPR
method using IT called ‘Navigator’. Andersen Consulting sold two parallel
and integrated processes – one focusing on the organizational and human
side of the change, the other on the technical or information systems
development side (see Werr et al., 1997). The study of consulting approaches
by Werr et al. suggests that management consultants package their products
to overcome the perceived intangibility of the consultancy service. But, by re-
defining it as a product they are also able to build in a situation of
dependency:
The methods are thus part of a more general institutionalization of

competence, which has the double function of facilitating the introduction
and socialization of newly recruited consultants and of increasing the
organisational (in contrast to the individual consultant’s) component in the
‘product’ sold to the client, thus binding the consultant to the company.
(Werr et al., 1997: 303)
Critics of the management consultancy literature argue that it tends to be

‘fragmented and discursive at best’ (Lundberg, 1997) and atheoretical (Gal-
lessich, 1985). Product dependency is created largely because consultants are
often ‘wrapped in a mystery’ (Lundberg, 1997). Lundberg’s proposal for a
general model of consultancy suggests that it should meet a number of
criteria, such as:
1 Not relying on esoteric or created constructs; where possible, it would

utilize existing ideas and convey them using familiar language.
2 Ideologically neutral, and not managerially, scientifically, humanistically
or critically biased.
3 Encompassing all the major schools of thought in management and
being potentially compatible with all of the dominant frames/
perspectives on organizations.
4 Applicable to alternative ontological positions about the nature of
reality.
5 Promoting future-oriented explanations, that is, it should be predictive
and hence teleological in form, over past-only explanations, eschewing
post-hoc, causative-explicative forms.
6 Explicit about its theoretic purpose, consciously trading off among the
purposes of precision, simplicity and generality.
Although this is a useful list of recommendations, problems emerge with
points 2 and 3. For example, it is unlikely that all the authors cited (for
example, Bolman and Deal, 1991; Morgan and Smircich, 1980; and Weick,
1979) would agree with the possibility of neutrality since this is influenced by
the methodology adopted and by the assumptions of the consultant. Fur-
thermore, the attempt to encompass all schools of thought is unrealistic since
this assumes they are complementary rather than competing forms of
interpretation based on incommensurate paradigms of knowledge.
In this way, it is argued that ‘management gurus offer certainty and a
potential route through the complexities of modern management life’ (Clark,
1995: 120). This is done by unfreezing existing attitudes, values and beliefs
with one of two forms of persuasion: either the promise of the economic
benefit, hoping that, as a result, performance will improve, or persuasion by
the empirical foundations of the ideas being promulgated, refreezing to
reinforce and permanently to fix the change (Clark, 1995: 124).
Management consultancy, therefore, has three major problems asso-
ciated with it:
1 Failure to diagnose critical problems.
2 The need to sell a product fails to focus on building the competencies
and thinking required for pro-active change from within the
organization.
3 Over-dependency on outside expertise tends to maintain top-down
management controls and maintain functional dependency.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE

ROLE OF THE CHANGE AGENT
While management consultancy often claims to be neutral, Strategic Human

Resource Development, like OD consultancy, has no such pretensions and
recognizes the inevitability of a values-driven position. In contrast to man-

agement consultancy, Strategic Human Resource Development seeks to
develop competencies within the organization rather than package the
expert’s product and create dependency.
The study of competencies has developed from three main routes:
human resources literature; the business strategy literature, and the OD
literature. The human resources literature argues that the jobs of individuals
are highly influenced by a set of competencies that determines the skills and
knowledge required for successful job performance (Spencer and Spencer,
1993). This argument suggests that organizations should focus on identifying
individuals with appropriate competencies and locating them at appropriate
levels in the organization. The strategy literature has been influenced by the
work of Prahalad and Hamel (1990) who argue that corporations can
identify a relatively small number of competencies that provide competitive
advantage in the marketplace. It is, however, to the OD literature that we
need to turn for the development of change agent competencies.
The role of the change agent
In their discussion of generic skills, Cummings and Huse (1989) argued that
OD practitioners should possess three types of skill in order to deal with
complexity and ambiguity. These are: (a) intrapersonal skills which are
related to conceptual and analytical ability; (b) interpersonal skills, to create
and maintain effective relationships by dealing with members’ perceptions;
and (c) consultation skills, which include organizational diagnosis, and the
ability to design and execute interventions.
For Carnall, managing change is comparable to conducting an orches-
tra. The role of the change agent requires similar skills to that of the
conductor in order to ‘energise and motivate, build cohesion, create a sense
of pace and timing, and provide a skilled performance while sustaining the
performance of others’ (1995: 159). To be successful at this activity requires
four core competencies which demand that the change agent is able (a) to
make decisions; (b) to build coalitions; (c) to achieve action; and (d) to
maintain the momentum and effort required for the change initiative. Each
core competency contains elements that identify specific skills to be achieved
by the change agent. Similarly, Buchanan and Boddy (1992) identify a ‘model
of expertise’ containing five clusters of attributes that appear to complement
those identified by Carnall. These refer to abilities to define goals, to manage
role relationships, to communicate effectively and to negotiate with key
players and, finally, to ‘manage up’ by being skilled in the art of organiza-
tional politics.
Like Carnall, Buchanan and Boddy suggest that the acquisition of
knowledge and skills is contingent on the characteristics of the organization.
Thus, ‘the expertise of the change agent is contextual’ (Buchanan and Boddy,
1992: 115) and requires the change agent to learn how to choose which
competencies are appropriate for a given situation. The choices are clearly
mediated by organizational culture, leadership style and the extent of

commitment throughout the organization. But the change agent has to
manage three variables simultaneously: the content of change itself, the
context (history, market situation, etc.) and the process (interpersonal fac-
tors) of change. From an interactional perspective, it follows that the main
skill is the ability to establish legitimacy for change ‘while conforming to
accepted custom and practice in the culture of the organization’ (ibid.: 70).
The recommendations offered by Carnall, and Buchanan and Boddy for
developing competencies have focused on strategic leadership. Strategic
Human Resource Development drives this argument for the development of
internal change agent competences further down the organization because it
was previously illustrated how the focus on pro-active change (the processual
factors that drives change internally) is potentially more important than
reactive change (the traditional planned change approach, which focused on
either restoring equilibrium or reacting to the changes in the marketplace).
Strategic Human Resource Development argues that in situations of pro-
active incremental change, one of the key factors in the success of the change
programme is the devolution of responsibilities further down the managerial
line.
Examples of the various types of Strategic Human Resource Develop-
ment interventions were illustrated in Table 1.1 on pp. 26 and 27. These
consisted of five types of change intervention:
1 acceptant change which dealt with subjective attitudes;

2 catalytic change which was responsible for transforming the situation in
some way by the change agent acting as catalyst;
3 confrontation which is requested by various parties;
4 prescriptive change which is forced on people;
5 principles, models and theories which inform the various OD/Strategic
Human Resource Development interventions.
Each of these intervention strategies require a modus operandi which

involved managing the relationship between the client and consultant
through process consultation and employing diagnostic and expert practices
that result from the application of behavioural skills and knowledge.
Managing the relationship between the client and

consultant through process consultation
Both Carnall and Buchanan and Body focus on the internal change agent. By
contrast, external consultants are used for a variety of reasons but predom-
inantly as catalysts of change. Since this book is concerned with internal
change agents, then it is necessary to elaborate how the relationship between
the client and consultant is established through process consultation. In this
respect, Schein (1997) provided principles for managing the relationship
between the client and consultant. These seek to establish a partnership
between the client(s) and the consultant in which ownership of the problem
and the solution always lies with the client. However, care must be taken
with the way in which the change agent engages with the client system:
Any helping or change process always has a target or a client. In most
discussions of consultation we refer to ‘clients’ as if they were always
clearly identifiable, but in reality the question of who actually is the client
can be ambiguous and problematical. One can find oneself not knowing for
whom one is working, or working with several clients whose goals are in
conflict with each other. One can identify ‘targets’ of change – others whose
problems we can see clearly but who do not see their own problems and
would resist being seen as ‘clients’. One can be working with an individual,
with a small or large group, or with a slice of a total organisation in a large
meeting. One can be working with the same individual but in different
roles, at one time counselling her as an individual manager, and at another
time helping her design a large-scale intervention to bring two of her
divisions into a collaborative relationship with each other. (Schein, 1997b:
202)
Problems of client over-dependence may occur if the consultant is defined
unwittingly by the client as the ‘expert’ rather than as the catalyst in search
of joint diagnosis, problem identification and solving. The client’s expecta-
tions have to be managed away from dependency by engaging the activities
and knowledge of other stakeholders in the organization. To clarify this
Schein attempts to identify various clients:
1 Contact clients (those individual(s) who first contact the consultant with
a request, question or issue).
2 Intermediate clients (the individuals or groups who or which get
involved in various interviews, meetings, and other activities as the
project evolves).
3 Primary clients (the individual(s) who ultimately ‘own’ the problem or
issue being worked on; they are typically also the ones who pay the
consulting bills or whose budget covers the consultation project).
4 Unwitting clients (or those who will be affected by the interventions but
who are not aware of it yet).
5 Indirect clients (members of the organization who are aware that they
will be affected by the interventions but who are unknown to the
consultant).
6 Ultimate clients (such as ‘the community, the total organisation, an
occupational group, or any other group that the consultant cares about
and whose welfare must be considered in any intervention that the
consultant makes’).
Once the client system is established, the modus operandi is process consulta-
tion. This is defined as a helping relationship that seeks to diagnose the
clinical needs of the client through which the pathological needs of the client
system are operationalized:
When I first formulated the concept of process consultation and contrasted
it with being an ‘expert’ or a ‘doctor’ in a helping relationship, I was trying
to argue that a model which I am now calling a ‘clinical’ model starts

instead with the needs of the client, is client driven and involves the
researcher in the client’s issues rather than involving the client in the
researcher’s issues. The word clinical is deliberately introduced here in
order to highlight that some perceived pathology is usually involved and
that the helper takes on the obligations that are associated with being in the
helping professions, i.e. the interests and the welfare of the client must be
protected at all times, and all of the helper’s actions, whether diagnostic or
not, are de facto interventions and must be evaluated as interventions
before they are undertaken. This clinical model is often also lumped into
‘action research’, but is fundamentally different in that the initiative
remains at all times with the client. (Schein, 1995: 15)
It is imperative that the change agent recognizes that each stage of organ-
izational diagnosis may also involve an unwitting intervention carrying
unintended consequences:
If they [the workforce] acquiesce they simply reinforce the very pathology
that may need to be addressed, or worse they may damage themselves by
revealing data to a superior who may take advantage of it. On the other
hand, if they refuse or participate only in a token fashion, they may either
distort the data or create a revolt that the CEO may not have anticipated
and may not know how to deal with. In both cases what is wrong is that
the consultant did not operate from a clinical model which would have
forced him or her to consider what the clinical consequences would be of
gathering data in a certain fashion.
It is my contention that a clinical process must a priori consider all of
these possibilities and must involve the initial client in an up-front process
of jointly figuring out each next step. The consultant must raise the
question of what would be the consequence of interviewing the sub-
ordinates or doing the survey, of how the data would be fed back and what
kinds of confidentiality would be guaranteed. Of greatest importance at
this stage is also to share with the contact client the possible outcomes,
especially the possibility that the data will reveal a problem in the relation-
ship of the client to the people who will be interviewed or surveyed. In
other words, what if a lot of negative data comes out about the boss who is
launching the project? Is he or she ready for it? How will they handle the
feedback? (ibid.: 15)
USING DIAGNOSTIC TECHNIQUES
Process consultation adopts an agenda which assumes that being a consult-

ant involves employing diagnostic and expert practices that result from the
application of skills and knowledge. This is similar to a doctor/patient
relationship (Schein, 1987; 1988; 1997; Cummings and Huse, 1989). Process
consultation requires the change agent to ‘engage organisation members in
diagnosis’ by asking the ‘right questions’ in relation to the level of inter-
vention (organizational, group and individual) and by collecting and analys-
ing information through a variety of methodological techniques, including
the use of statistics, survey techniques and force-field analysis (Cummings

and Huse, 1989: 64-105). Therefore, process consultation requires the
change agent to involve the organization’s members at a diagnostic stage in
order to identify the appropriate type of intervention.
Depth of involvement
Careful diagnosis is performed when the change agent considers which one
of the five Strategic Human Resource Development intervention strategies to
pursue. Each will be guided by the level of intervention as well as by the
motives for engagement. The latter are, however, determined by consultation.
There is one other important consideration and that is the depth of the
involvement in the intervention. Following Harrison (1996), the depth of
intervention is central to the mode of consultation within the organization.
Depth refers to the extent to which change agents are required to influence
the attitudes, values and behaviours of organizational members. Strategies
may range on a continuum from instrumental (surface level) to deep
(emotionally charged). Thus, the deeper the intervention, the greater the
extent to which core areas of the personality or self are the focus of the
change attempt.
At the diagnostic stage, thought has to be given to the type of inter-
vention required. As Harrison notes:
If, on the one hand, the consultant seeks information about relatively
public and observable aspects of behavior and relationship and if he tries to
influence directly only these relatively surface characteristics and processes,
we would then categorize his intervention strategy as being closer to the
surface. If, on the other hand, the consultant seeks information about very
deep and private perceptions, attitudes, or feelings and if he intervenes in a
way which directly affects these processes, then we would classify his
intervention strategy as one of considerable depth. (1996: 16)
The consultant has to decide the extent to which he or she wishes to

intervene. For example, if it is considered necessary to deal simply with
organizational roles, procedures and operational processes, then the depth of
the intervention, and hence the diagnosis, is surface level. This is what
Harrison refers to as a process of rational analysis in which the tasks to be
performed are determined and specified and then ‘sliced up into role defini-
tions for persons and groups in the organization’ (1996: 16). This level is
essentially non-controversial and should not cause problems of interpersonal
conflict:
Persons are assumed to be moderately interchangeable, and in order to

make this approach work it is necessary to design the organisation so that
the capacities, needs, and values of the individual which are relevant to role
performance are relatively public and observable, and are possessed by a
fairly large proportion of the population from which organisation members
are drawn. (ibid.: 16)
If, on the other hand, it is considered that the problem is more fundamentally
behavioural in origin (for example, motivation, team relationships, customer-
oriented behaviours, leadership issues, stress-related work roles, traumatized
individuals, etc.), then the intervention is required to deal with emotional/
behavioural issues and requires appropriate (socio-psychological) expertise.
Deeper strategies are more likely to be at the individual and group/team
level. These may be evaluative, such as those that attempt to evaluate
individual performance in order to improve it. This is carried out today by
personal trainers or sports psychologists with the voluntary permission of the
client. This is typical of the industrial psychologist’s work in selection,
placement, appraisal, in the counselling of employees and in the technical
performance of difficult tasks such as flying an aeroplane or driving a car
since the task is to modify behaviours, habits and, sometimes, attitudes.
There may be other circumstances where coercion of certain clients occurs
because a learned authority acts in the public interest. Such situations may
arise with clients who have mental disorders. But the protection of the client
must always be paramount. The change agent will always be guided by a
code of ethics and, on some occasions, is guided by statute.
Harrison (1996) makes it clear that a consultant’s role should be
consciously constructed around a focus either on instrumentality (work
behaviour) or on a deeper level by dealing with interpersonal and intra-
personal relationships. At the interpersonal level, the focus is on:
feelings, attitudes, and perceptions which organisation members have
about others. At this level we are concerned with the quality of human
relationships within the organisation, with warmth and coldness of mem-
bers to one another, and with the experiences of acceptance and rejection,
love and hate, trust and suspicion among groups and individuals. At this
level the consultant probes for normally hidden feelings, attitudes, and
perceptions. He works to create relationships of openness about feelings
and to help members to develop mutual understanding of one another as
persons. (ibid.: 17)
The deepest level of intervention – intrapersonal analysis – requires the

consultant to use ‘a variety of methods to reveal the individual’s deeper
attitudes, values, and conflicts regarding his own functioning, identity, and
existence’ (ibid.: 4). Intrapersonal analysis may deal with ‘fantasy’ and may
be ‘symbolic’, involving techniques which began in the 1960s, such as
T-group sessions and risk-taking laboratory approaches as well as the
Tavistock model. More recent examples include the ability to use metaphors
to reconstruct aspects of organizational life. Storytelling and enabling clients
to represent organizational life through the construction of genre images
have also been used to successfully transform clients’ thinking.
The level at which the consultant operates carries implications for the
client. At the surface end, the methods of intervention are easily commun-
icated and made public and the client–consultant relationship may involve
learning and understanding something of the change agent’s skills. At the
deeper levels (the interpersonal and intrapersonal process analyses), skills of
intervention and change involve special learning and sensitivity and are
usually beyond the ability of the organization since the consultant must
uncover ‘information which is ordinarily private and hidden’ (ibid.: 20).
Action research and process consultancy are usually taken to involve the
client system in both the gathering and analysis of the data in relation to
the identified problem. Action research has parallels with clinical work (see
the section on psychodynamics below) because the client requires research
assisted by the change agent/consultant. For example:
When Lewin first formulated action research it was clearly a case of the
researchers wanting to figure out how to be more successful in implement-
ing some changes that the researcher desired. He found that by involving
the targeted population in the research process, they became more amen-
able and committed to the desired change. But the initial drive came from
the change agent, and it was the change agent’s goals that were driving the
process. In this model, action research involves the client system as
the beneficiary. But the client did not initiate the process and it was not the
client’s needs that drove the process. It was the researcher’s choice to
involve the client. (Schein, 1995: 14)
The socio-technical systems/psychodynamic perspective
The socio-technical systems/psychodynamic perspective has developed from

the work of diverse social scientists who took on various consulting roles in
organizations. While this approach to consultancy is related to the processual
issues raised by process consultancy, it takes a particular direction with its
focus on psychodynamics. Thus, the consultant and client system ‘are
partners in the process of organisational analysis and design, and there is
progressively wider involvement of the client system in designing and manag-
ing the successive phases of the change itself’ (Miller, 1997: 187). While the
beginning of a client–consultant relationship is likely to be concerned with
rational objectives in relation to the management of change, moving on
logically to discuss the task of planning the stages of implementation,
consultants and clients often find that the route, no matter how well planned,
is littered with obstacles. These are the processual issues often referred to by
the critics of planned change approaches. The major difference to other forms
of management consultancy is that while many will talk about ‘eliminating’
resistance to change, from this perspective resistance is a natural human
process. Therefore, resistance needs to be understood and worked with in
order to develop ongoing learning experiences within organizations.
The systems/psychodynamic approach emerged from the work of social
scientists at the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s and 1960s concerned with
sociological and psychological aspects of organizations. Effectively, it com-
bines systems theory with psychoanalysis. Thus, whereas the former is
focused on holistic social and technical systems, the latter attempts to illum-
inate unconscious processes found in the individual’s biography and in the
interaction of groups.
Systems theory was informed principally by the work of functionalist

sociologists influenced by the organismic approach to social life who began
to see organizations as social systems with interconnected parts. Psycho-
logists like Lewin (1946; 1947) drew attention to the ‘Gestalt properties of
human systems’ and to the tendency of systems to move towards a ‘quasi-
stationary equilibrium’ (Lewin, 1950; Miller, 1997: 188). As the founder of
action research, Lewin informed the later work of the Tavistock Institute.
The development of human relations theory, and the later socio-
technical system, emerged as a reaction to the dominance of the machine
metaphor through the work of Trist and Bamforth (1951). Combined with
the psychoanalytic work of Klein (1946; 1952; 1959), Jaques (1951; 1955;
1995) and Bion (1961), work relationships were increasingly investigated for
their social processes and their psychic projections and defences.
The consultancy role reflects this socio-psychological concern through a
humanistic perspective. Although not every practitioner embraced the med-
ical analogy of illness and treatment, some practitioners ‘saw organisational
consultancy as a macro-version of psychoanalysis’ (Miller, 1997: 191). The
role of the psychodynamic consultant is defined by Miller when he points out
that the consultant–client relationship is an attempt to gain a deep apprecia-
tion of the change relationship:
The decision to act (or not) rests with the client; both jointly review the
outcomes and, if appropriate, move to a next phase. It is an action research
approach. There are two more specific influences. First, the transference is
central to the analytic method. That is to say, the analyst becomes a screen
onto which the patient projects underlying and perhaps unconscious feel-
ings towards key figures in the patient’s earlier life. In the analyst this
evokes counter-transference: the analyst either has the experience of becom-
ing the fantasised character in the patient’s internal drama (a process of
projective identification) or the projections resonate with some parallel
dynamic in the analyst’s own inner world. Correspondingly, the feelings
evoked in the organizational consultant about the role one is being put into
and the way one is being used provide data about underlying processes in
the client system. The other influence is the recognition that, as with the
analyst, it is an important function to provide for the client system a
‘holding environment’ (Winnicott, 1965) by serving as a safe container who
can accept and survive the anxieties and sometimes hostile projections
coming from the client system. (Miller, 1997: 191)
TURNING DATA INTO KNOWLEDGE
Attempting to understand organizational life is not simply an act of imposing

oneself upon the organization and recording all the data we can lay our
hands on, since we will be left with a mass of unconnected details of varying
complexity and with incoherent connections. The process of data collection
can overwhelm individuals to the extent that the data may not be written up
satisfactorily. Skilful analysis has little to do with the accumulation of facts
and more to do with the relationships between them. It also has less to do
with ‘facts’ – the telephone directory approach which simply collects infor-
mation – and more to do with interpretation and insight.
Turner’s paper on connoisseurship is an inspiration for anyone engaged
in organizational diagnosis. Its main contribution is the identification of two
related issues. These are, first, the need to find clarity in complexity and,
second, the need to deal with ambiguity. Both are related and require the
analyst to possess specific skills:
How, then, would I approach the study of an organisation? In the crudest
outline, I would need to establish first my broad purpose in carrying out the
study. I would need an interest in a particular type of organisation, and in
particular types of activities which might go on within such milieu. I would
not normally have a very cut-and-dried set of questions prepared, or a set
of strong preconceptions about what I might find. I would want to
negotiate entry in a way which would enable me to ‘botanize’, to observe
and begin to sort out and name the social flora and fauna to be found in the
setting concerned, so that, in the process, sharper research questions could
develop. I would need to gain access to an appropriate organisation, or, in
some instances, to appropriate documents, negotiating with power holders
and ‘gatekeepers’ as necessary. (Turner, 1988: 109)
The change agent is likely to begin with a problem-oriented approach since

the intervention itself would require an act of entry, scouting, data collection.
But this, in itself, is not enough since we might be tempted to engage in
uncoordinated activities such as recording interviews, making notes, creating
a chronological record of activities, making observations, plans, speculating
and hypothesizing and all the other activities required of a Strategic Human
Resource Development change agent. Before any such activity, the change
agent requires a perspective. A perspective enables the coherent recording
and analysis of data by making certain types of information relevant and
practical for the purpose of the intervention. This is because information is
replaced by knowledge. This is what Turner (1988) refers to as the art of
knowing. The art of ‘knowing’ takes us beyond pure description by engaging
in ‘intellectual passion’. Turner’s reference to the work of Polanyi succinctly
makes the connection between knowledge and connoisseurship:
passionate participation in the act of knowing . . . manifested in the
appreciation of probability and order in the exact sciences and . . . even
more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and
connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an
appraisal and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge,
bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity.
(Polanyi, 1958, p. I6)
To become a connoisseur requires the skill of ‘social knowing’ in addition to

‘analytic comprehension’. Thus, ‘rather than merely absorbing knowledge,
the connoisseur pours his or her attention into the “subsidiary awareness of
particulars”, passionately participating in the act of knowing and at the same
time appraising the quality of that which is known’ (Turner, 1988: 115).
Taking a perspective requires both knowledge of ‘conceptual leverage’

(Schatzman and Strauss, 1973: 118) and the ability to apply it. This ability is
what Ravetz calls ‘craft knowledge’ (Ravetz, 1971; Turner, 1988: 116) or
tacit understanding which is passed on from members of the same (behav-
ioural) scientific community. This is similar to Kuhn’s notion of paradigm in
which members of a scientific community come to defend or refute scientific
evidence. In this way we can contrast OD consultancy with other forms of
‘expert’ consultancy because of the underlying (behavioural) perspective
adopted. Yet participants within this perspective can recognize a variety of
approaches taken to the investigation of organizational problems. In this
sense we can locate historical OD traditions of organizational theory in the
form of open systems, organizational culture, systems thinking, and quality
management, as well as intervention strategies and techniques such as team
development, self-directed learning, training approaches to personal growth
and empowerment, T-groups, and force field analysis organizational
learning.
At the beginning of this section it was stated that complexity has to be
reduced yet not over-simplified. This needs to be qualified, however. At too
high a level of complexity, analysis is overwhelmed while at too low a level of
complexity, the theorizing is sterile (Turner, 1988). The consultant will be
faced with many complexities, ambiguities and overlapping perceptions yet it
is necessary to tell a story that identifies the categories of events, issues and
problems through causal links that specify their intensity and significance.
Thus, the consultant or change agent must select and prioritize data to
determine their significance through propositional statements. These state-
ments will contain some degree of causality in which case the ‘links must be
made with care, tying them in a defensible manner to the data collected’
(ibid.: 120).
Morgan’s celebrated Images of Organisation (1986) is a book about the
way metaphor enables a ‘reading of organisation’. It belongs to a tradition
that has its roots in the work of various writers on language and social
thought. It is particularly the writers on metaphor that interest him. These
include Vico in the eighteenth century and Nietzsche in the nineteenth
century. More recently, the work of twentieth-century philosophers such as
Cassirer (1946), Wittgenstein (1958), and social theorists such as Black
(1962), Burke (1962), Pepper (1942) and writers on linguistics, hermen-
eutics, and psychoanalysis such as Eco (1976), Jakobson and Halle (1962)
and Lacan (1966) are central to this debate. Although there are a number of
others in this tradition such as Ortony (1979) and Sacks (1979), it is the
impact of analysis through metaphor to be found in the work of Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) that has clearly influenced Morgan’s own thinking.
To those critics who have argued that scientific discourse should elim-
inate the use of figurative language Morgan cites writers such as Koestler
(1969), Miller (1978) and Kuhn (1970) who discuss the role of metaphor in
the creative imagination of scientists. His own work has previously explored
the metaphorical basis of organization theory (Morgan, 1980; 1983). In the
debates about the place of metaphor in scientific discourse there is a danger

of cheering one side of the debate rather than the other. While we need to be
cautious about adopting the ‘supermarket’ of metaphors approach, it is
nevertheless apparent that the use of metaphor as a vehicle for transforming
meaning and thus creating a new way of thinking is evident (even in the use
of the word ‘supermarket’ in this sentence). It is therefore necessary to
identify the limitations of metaphor before we can proceed to recommend
their virtues.
First, there is the debate between positivistic and constructivist modes of
enquiry. The predominant style of reporting knowledge to an audience of
learned academics can be described as objective realism. This style assumes a
positivistic or universally objective attitude to organizational data, implying
that ‘facts’ speak for themselves through a ‘rational’ process of statistical
indices and measurable variables. The ‘natural’ language for this style is to be
found in mathematics which is considered to be unambiguous and univer-
sally valid. Although this in itself is debatable, the major problem emerges
when research findings are analysed surreptitiously through a positivistic
perspective and transformed into a quantifiable scientific discourse that
assumes that words are uncontentious, neutral and free from multiple
connotations. Research reports which depend on statistical correlations
claim to be truthful representations of reality precisely because they are seen
to be ‘consensible’ (Ziman, 1991) and logically self-consistent. The reality,
however, is usually different because academic discourse, however neutral its
intention, is presented in concepts with descriptive power: full of hyperbole,
metaphor, simile and figures of speech which mark out the territory of
natural language and distinguish it from scientific-mathematical language.
Therefore, while natural language is therefore ‘imperfectly consensible’, its
vocabulary is qualitatively richer than algebra (Ziman, 1991: 14) and yet, in
positivistic accounts, is assumed to be neutral. The following example
illustrates this mixture of (unexplored) metaphors, tropes and value judge-
ments despite the authors’ attempt to convince the reader of the factual
nature of their statements with the use of statistical indices:
The competitiveness just mentioned was a specific target of concern.
Beyond the decreased ‘battling’ among managers, several other desirable
trends were found that indicated a less confrontational and competitive
organisational climate . . . managers reported a significant decline (X pre =
3.62 vs x post = 3.17; p < 0.05) in their perception that their superiors
fostered a competitive climate within the work unit. Consequently they
were less likely to compete with other managers in terms of work quan-
tity (X pre = 3.64 vs x post = 3.25; p < 0.05). (Sommer and Merritt,
1994: 58)
This ‘universally objective’ attitude requires authored control over the

selection and presentation of data. Although informed implicitly by the
researcher’s values and assumptions, it is presented as a mirror of reality
observable to all. The theories and assumptions which guide a particular
author’s objective attitude, in reality, order the data. Studies in organizational
behaviour and development are no exception despite their concern for

interpretative issues. As Burrell has argued: ‘Counting metaphor as a replace-
able rhetorical device presumes that we must always be able, sooner or later,
to hit upon a proper and unambiguous description’ (1973: 258). While this
was, of course, the original objective of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, his later
writings in the Philosophical Investigations illustrate the function of lan-
guage as a continuously changing series of language games which invite the
observer to participate in order to fully understand their import.
Such discourse is inherently reductionist, believing in the possibility of a
non-figurative language (Tsoukas, 1993) and assumes that a science ‘laced
with metaphors’ makes its own programme of falsifiability impossible (Pin-
der and Bourgeois, 1982: 644). The search for truth, the desire to eliminate
bias, the assumption that facts have an existence independent from that of
the observer, and the application of research techniques of proof and
verification end up as fictions which go unrecognized by the researcher who
fails to appreciate the artful construction of relevant data into meaningful
stories that explore, explain and enable a discussion of organizational
activities within the organization. This is more in keeping with the aims of
action research through which the ‘facts’ are interrogated and presented from
multiple perspectives.
The limitation of Morgan’s ‘mixed metaphors’ results from the confu-
sion with which he associates metaphors with entirely different functions.
This is what Tsoukas (1993) refers to as a distinction between explanatory
metaphors (domination, flux and transformation, psychic prison) and inter-
ventionist metaphors (machines, organismic, culture, holographic, political).
Morgan, therefore, confuses the reader by implying that all metaphors carry
equal weight. This is clearly not the case since their functions are very
different. The first type explain something about contemporary organizations
whereas the second type enable managers to intervene in the reconstruction
of their organizations. Tsoukas illustrates this point clearly:
Consider, for instance, Morgan’s case study at the end of his book Images
of Organisations, in which lie attempts to show how the insights of eight
different metaphors can be used in diagnosing, critically evaluating and
solving concrete organisational problems. There are two weaknesses in his
approach. First, despite his earlier remarks about the equality (or rather
equifinality), in terms of practical utility, of diverse metaphors, Morgan
himself favours one particular type of discourse (and the accompanying
machine, organismic and holographic metaphors) when he talks about
effective management, improving current organisational practices, and
enhancing the ability of organisations to solve problems through their
emphasis on cultural socialization and decentralized control . . . Similarly,
in a later book derived from empirical research, Morgan urges managers to
‘become more proactive and skilled in dealing with the managerial tur-
bulence that lies ahead’ . . . and acknowledges that organisations face the
dual problem of ‘how to do the right thing and do it well’ . . .
In other words, instrumental discourse of a managerialist type is used
de facto when attempting to comprehend and influence organisational
phenomena. To talk, however, about the ‘effectiveness’ of current organisa-

tions necessarily entails concessions towards a particular discourse, thus
implicitly prioritizing metaphors according to the rules of such a discourse.
In short, Morgan finds himself in the contradictory position of theoretically
proclaiming the usefulness of all metaphors (and their associated mode of
discourse), while practically privileging some of them at the expense of
others.
Second, the use of metaphors is ordered de facto according to the
degree to which they allow human intervention in concrete organisational
situations. In the beginning was the environment, and Morgan’s analysis of
the case study starts with the organismic metaphor to be followed by the
prescriptions derived from the holographic and culture metaphors. It
becomes obvious that the other metaphors have a residual status, and are
thus of marginal utility, due to lack of adequate information. (1993: 32)
There are other relevant issues to consider. First, the nature of the discourse
is intended to enable managers to learn how to ‘read’ or analyse their
organizations and it is clear that only the interventionist metaphors have
utility in their application to organizations. Thus, ‘intervention is future-
oriented and implies action within a short-term time frame, while explana-
tion is retrospective and may or may not lead to action towards a specific
problem.’ (ibid.: 33). Second, because certain metaphors are algorithmic
(e.g., machine, organism) in that their purpose is prescriptive and, inter-
estingly, relate to structure, others (e.g., culture, political systems, psychic
prison) are heuristic in that their purpose is to indicate (preferred) behaviour
(ibid.: 33).
Since the purpose of this chapter is to engage in debate about organiza-
tional development and the art of connoisseurship, the discussion is restricted
to the nature of intervention and to suggest, therefore, how certain types of
metaphors can be used productively from a Strategic Human Resource
Development perspective. This is clearly only one type of discourse (inter-
ventionist) and while it should be informed by others (critical, interpretive,
positivistic etc.), it is necessary to separate it from them as a discrete activity.
In this way it should be clear that a form of intervention will adopt a voice
that clearly identifies the type of discourse taking place.
The central issue is the need to separate analytic insight and the creation
of knowledge from intervention strategies in organizations. While the first
offers the possibility of insight, the latter is inevitably political because it
involves some form of mediation and control in the transformation from one
state to another. From a constructivist perspective, a discourse of Strategic
Human Resource Development requires an ability to speak with the subjects
of investigation and provide an intelligible interpretation of social order. For
participants, stories about organizational life are structured so as to provide
the listener with a commitment to a valued position. From this perspective
the Strategic Human Resource Development change agent/consultant is
required to read the organization like a text using the conceptual levers of
organizational behaviour as a grammar to provide a discourse relevant to the
client. This is a skilled accomplishment akin to the acquisition of craft
TABLE 5.1
Root metaphors as
Root metaphor Mode of analysis Type of analogy
analytical tools
Machine Behaviourist: observation of response Man as machine
to stimuli; Scientific Management Organization as machine
Organism Functionalist: observation of norms; Organization as organic
Health of system and search for system; Culture as control
dysfunctions
Drama Symbolic interactionism/constructivist: Dramaturgic analogy;
observation of symbolic culture as negotiated order
communication
Discourse Talk, speech acts, discourse: Language games; Meaning
observation of language in context as innovation; Discourse as
power relationships
knowledge discussed earlier. Without it the change agent will blunder into
vague generalizations lacking sensitivity and meaningful significance.
In order to avoid the endless relativity of metaphor and tropes we need
to locate the root metaphors of organizational theory (machine, organism,
drama and discourse). These give rise to others but are themselves defined as
root metaphors of organization analysis because they provide more than the
array of images (or supermarket if you wish to be critical) that Morgan
recommends, since they also depend upon a particular form of analysis (as
illustrated in Table 5.1).
This particular type of metaphorical analysis is more useful because the
image it conveys is not only analogical but located in a known analytic
perspective that has generated unique theoretical insights. It gives metaphor a
status similar to that of ‘conjecture’, as described by Popper, and enables the
researcher to view knowledge as a process of rigorous criticism, hypotheses
testing, and the formulation of better theories (McCourt, 1997: 517). It is suf-
ficient to note that each root metaphor requires different research methods
and techniques of investigation.
If we define the purpose of the intervention then we can begin to see
how they can be used more productively. This is described in Table 5.2.
Root metaphors and their practical use as intervention

strategies
The machine metaphor The machine metaphor can be viewed in two

ways, as indicated in Table 5.1. The first emerged from Behaviouristic
Psychology and created a view of man as machine. The second resulted from
the application of scientific management and from Taylor’s ideas in par-
ticular.
Behaviouristic psychology was informed largely by the ideas of Skinner
who argued that it was necessary to provide a ‘functional’ or causal
explanation of behaviour patterns. For Skinner it was necessary to view man
TABLE 5.2
Root metaphor Role of the change agent Root metaphors
and their practical
Machine Purpose of intervention: to guide and develop employees task
use as intervention
skills
strategies
1 To control training to predefined schedules in which
consideration has to be given to the design of the system in
respect of mechanistic – there can be no room for deviation
from protocols, such as Health and Safety training, air traffic
control etc. – or fluid features such as knowledge and
experience of staff, the structure and shape of the
communications networks; the nature of compliance.
2 To control systems (organization as machine) such as quality
control, administration, lines of accountability, etc. Today, the
exercise of control will be a democratic function of team
processes. Consideration of behavioural controls will be of
paramount importance in clarifying the objectives, in planning,
organizing and directing the various aspects of the change
process.
3 To achieve personal control and mastery by changing habits,
behaviours or attitudes.
Organism Purpose of intervention: to transform systems needs

1 To manage the health of the system and identify dysfunctions
through an open systems framework of inputs, outputs and
internal processes.
2 To continually examine the ‘needs’ of the system by managing
the organization’s culture.
3 To anticipate the consequences of change.
Drama Purpose of intervention: to transform perceptions and manage the

service performance
1 To identify the front and backstage performances and to
critically examine the need for precise scripts in the performance
of an operation (as in the case of emergency services) or
innovative performances in order to deal with unique situations
or events.
2 To negotiate the culture of the organization and to manage
change by involving the different interests of various
stakeholders.
3 To identify the effectiveness of teamwork in relation to the
performance required for service encounters.
Discourse Purpose of intervention: to analyse opportunities for

organizational learning
1 To improve the effectiveness of organizational relationships
through the analysis of talk related to continual improvement
(e.g., the analysis of Speech Acts in relation to teamwork).
2 To manage change through action research to identify cognitive
dysfunctions.
3 To apply a normative-reeducative method to convert the tacit
causes of ineffectiveness into explicit formulations.
as analogous to a machine and thereby avoid the investigation of inner

mental states. For example he argues that:
The Practice of looking inside an organism for an explanation of behaviour

has tended to obscure the variables which are immediately available for
scientific analysis. These variables lie outside the organism, in its immediate
environment and in its environmental history. They have a Physical status
to which the usual techniques of science are adapted, and they make it
possible to explain behaviour as other subjects are explained in science.
(Skinner, 1953: 31)
Change results from the selective reinforcement of one element in behaviour

and can be explained without any reference to mental processes. Although
Skinner’s experiments were conducted on animals, he saw little distinction
between the human and other animal organisms since the same causal chain
consisting of three links applied to both. These were: (a) an operation
performed on the organism from without; (b) an inner condition; and (c) a
behaviour. The behaviourist, therefore, argued that it was unnecessary to
examine the middle link since action can be explained without reference to
this internal mental state.
While this empirical model can be practically demonstrated, as far as
humans are concerned, it is limited to training or behaviour modification
programmes that require conditioned reflexes in order to deal with routine
situations. Obvious examples include training programmes involving health
and safety systems, which are predetermined by the trainer, and air traffic
control and flight simulators, which require the control of stimulus and
response. An example of behaviour modification may include the introduc-
tion and reinforcement of new stimuli in the case of addictive behaviours or
the modification of habits to improve performance in the case of sports
training. Similarly, fears and phobias may be overcome in this way.
In the case of Scientific Management, Taylor focused on the task in the
attempt to establish a true science of work. As a management consultant at
the Bethlehem Steel Corporation he demonstrated his ideas. As a starting
point the task had to be analysed and when documented and understood, a
series of prescribed rules were established. Taylor’s work led to the so-called
scientific selection and training strategies we see in organizations today. His
work on the measurement of task sequences, while heavily criticized for its
failure to understand the needs of the social system required to implement
tasks, has, nevertheless, led to the control of many contemporary workplaces
through techniques of surveillance. Such techniques include quality control
and the use of sophisticated electronic technology. However, it should be
stressed that there is nothing wrong with quality control or electronic
techniques per se. It is the motives of senior decision-makers and the use to
which they are put that causes the problem. While one of the major problems
of the Classical school was its attempt to construct a universal solution to the
management of organization, it is possible to argue that jobs, by contrast,
can be functionally analysed to find the best way of doing them.
The practical role for this type of intervention today is really limited to
identifying where controls are required or where they are deficient because
they result in too many accidents (as in rail systems or air disasters). This is
essentially an issue of reliability as Weick (1994) has pointed out:
As organisations and their technologies have become more complex, they
have also become susceptible to accidents that result from unforeseen
consequences of misunderstood interventions. Recent examples include
Bhopal, the Challenger, and Three Mile Island. What is interesting about
these examples is that they involve issues of reliability, not the conventional
organisational issues of efficiency. Organisations in which reliability is a
more pressing issue than efficiency often have unique problems in learning
and understanding, which, if unresolved, affect their performance
adversely. (1994: 147)
Although Weick does not limit discussion to this particular form of analysis,
it is clear that error-free performance is the requirement of expert systems.
Therefore it can be argued that a better match between system complexity
and human complexity can occur basically in one of two ways: ‘either the
system becomes less complex or the human more complex’ (ibid.: 147).
Finally, the machine metaphor is useful as a Strategic Human Resource
Development intervention in order to construct training schedules in relation
to controlled systems (administration, sales marketing, production, etc.) that
require quality assurance and lines of accountability. The role of the change
agent is to analyse and redesign the way in which tasks can be managed and
controlled more effectively. Change agents are responsible for the develop-
ment of employees’ task skills and training in relation to the control of all
work processes. Central to this role is the need to identify the extent of
mechanistic control. This distinction was first made by Burns and Stalker
(1961) in their discussion of mechanistic and organic systems. For example, a
mechanistic system will be required for specific reasons such as air traffic
controller, health and safety, food standards, or quality control designed to
achieve standardized services or products in a uniform manner. On the other
hand, some systems will require a high degree of fluidity. This is the case with
systems that must deal with regularly changing conditions such as knowledge
systems or networks of people who are instrumental in developing ideas or
exploring their imagination in a collaborative way. In reality, all organiza-
tions will contain a mixture of mechanistic and fluid systems although, in
some, there will be a higher preponderance of one type over another. The key
questions are: what needs to be controlled? And, for what reasons? In
relation to fluidity, decisions will therefore need to be made about (a) the
application of knowledge and experience of staff – whether staff must be tied
to a strict script, as in the case of an air traffic controller, or not; (b) the
structure and shape of the communications networks; and (c) the nature of
compliance. That is, whether it is based on rigid adherence to rules (as in
safety systems) or whether it requires motivation and commitment from the
team to achieve the task. In saying this, however, change agents need to be
mindful of the controversial nature of control. Since the prime objective is
improvements in organizational performance, there is a danger that change

agents or managers will resort to a classical approach. Therefore, considera-
tion of behavioural controls will be of paramount importance in clarifying
the objectives, in planning, organizing and directing the various aspects of
the change process. Thus, today, the exercise of control will be a democratic
function of team processes and no longer the prescriptive command of tasks
without regard for the behavioural prerequisites of the organization’s culture.
Front-line employees have to be convinced to articulate their know-how
(tacit knowledge) in order that it can be programmed (Huy, 2001: 606).
The organismic metaphor The original Functionalist perspective on

organizations was provided by the sociologist Talcott Parsons who viewed
organizations as if they were small-scale societies. This form of organizational
analysis was based on his social systems theory which suggested that although
organizations have interdependent component parts, the organization as a
whole will have basic survival needs similar to any biological organism. The
whole is therefore viewed as greater than the sum of all the individual parts.
When organizations interact with one another and with the environment in
general, they adapt their structure and goals to changes in the environment.
However, an organization that cannot adapt is unlikely to survive. As with
the wider Functionalist or organismic perspective in sociological theory,
organizations can be seen as analogous to organisms because they have
inputs which are then converted to outputs. Just as people have inputs (such
as food, water, information, ideas, symbols) which are transformed or con-
verted to satisfy various needs, organizations similarly will have needs. When
an organization’s needs are fully met, it can be regarded as healthy. Central to
the accomplishment of the organization’s needs are decisions about the indi-
cators that specify a healthy state. In the past, these were performance
indicators relating to finance and deviations from conformance. More
recently these have come to include the wider notion of performance manage-
ment derived, on the one hand, from Human Resource Management and on
the other, from Total Quality Management. We might regard performance
indicators as critical success factors in pursuit of the mission. Deviations from
this state of health, however, will lead to dysfunction. Diagnosis will there-
fore require an examination of critical processes beginning with inputs and
ending with outputs.
The open systems framework of input–conversion–output can be
applied to organizations. The four key elements (task, technology, people and
structure) to be managed are the interdependent parts. When changes in one
element emerge (for example, changes in the people element involving skill,
knowledge, personality traits, motivations, group dynamics, political inter-
actions etc.), they will cause subsequent changes elsewhere in the system. If
this is not managed carefully, then it will have consequences for the way the
other elements perform (e.g., tasks may become vague, technology – tools,
machines, techniques - may become outdated and structural relationships
may become increasingly inappropriate to meet the needs of the customer.
The health of the system depends upon the maintenance of these inter-
changes. Although it may be difficult, it is possible to trace the causes of
dysfunctions which, when discovered, may be considered to represent the
manifestation of deeper (latent) behavioural traits. More recently this has
become one of the central tenets of quality management which seeks to
identify and remove problems by influencing culture.
Finally, the metaphor is useful: (a) to manage the health of the system
and identify any dysfunctions through an open systems framework; and (b)
to continually examine the ‘needs’ of the system by managing the organiza-
tion’s culture in the interests of the customer. The role of the change agent is
to analyse and redesign work processes that result from the tasks. The
primary role here is to consider the extent to which changes in the external
and internal environments need to be identified for their implications to the
management of the organization. Change agents will therefore be concerned
with the consequences of causality. For example, changes in markets or
legislation will determine the thinking of employees in making internal
adjustments to strategy or culture. Since it is impossible to control all con-
sequences of change, then dysfunctions will inevitably result. The ‘needs’ of
the system will change and it is therefore important that change interventions
are introduced in a timely manner.
The metaphor of drama In Chapter 3 it was argued that an inter-

pretive (phenomenological) approach viewed cultural integration as problem-
atic since agreement is a temporary and continuously negotiated arena of
volatile social interactions. The metaphor of drama, as part of this tradition,
contrasts with the positivistic metaphors of machine and organism discussed
above.
Influenced by symbolic interactionism, the drama metaphor is influenced
by the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman (1964), whose metaphor of
dramaturgical performance provides a terminology for the social analysis of
public performances. The idea of life as drama rests on five key concepts
which are used to analyse public performances. These are persona, perform-
ance, staging, teamwork and roles. Briefly, persona refers to the fact that
people play multiple roles each day and each of the roles requires the adop-
tion of a particular persona. As a result, we select our behaviour in order to
create the impression we would like others to see. A persona is also projected
with the use of a mask such as make-up, hairstyle, glasses and clothes. The
second concept, performance, suggests that we put on a performance to
create a desired impression in front of others. The third concept, staging,
refers to the manipulation of the setting. Settings can be described as front
or back stage arenas. In front stage arenas people use props to convey
impressions to the audience. It is the front stage where the careful crafting of
the performance is organized. Front stage refers to office, reception areas,
living rooms, shops or ceremonial occasions. The fourth concept, teams,
refers to the way that people work at teamwork in order to present a united
front whether or not that is the case in reality. Finally, roles are performed for
the benefit of others. By adopting this vocabulary it is possible to analyse the

way people in organizations perform. This is particularly obvious in a service
encounter where the ability to convey a convincing performance is crucial.
The drama metaphor begins with the phenomenological critique of func-
tional analysis. This is illustrated by Bolman and Deal (1994) who argue that
such interventions usually assume a linear cause and effect sequence between
activities and outcomes or between problems and their solutions. In this way
too much credibility is given to rational decision-making criteria through the
usual assumptions such as ‘Leaders make things happen’, ‘Administrators
administer’, ‘Structures co-ordinate activity’ and ‘Planning shapes the future’.
As they point out, ‘Such statements seem so obvious that they are rarely
questioned’, yet ‘these “obvious” connections often fail in the everyday
world’ (Bolman and Deal, 1994: 93). A good example is provided by the
‘Front’ and ‘Backstage’ performances that in reality shaped the drama of
the Polaris Missile System:
The development in the United States of the Polaris Missile System was
heralded as an example of government activity at its best. One of its
distinctive characteristics was the introduction of modern management
techniques such as PERT charts and Program Planning and Budgeting
System (PPBS) into the public sector. Those techniques were reflected in
several structural forms, such as specialist roles, technical divisions, man-
agement meetings, and a Special Projects Office. Since Polaris turned out to
be a highly successful project, it was easy to conclude that the modern
management techniques were a major causal factor of this success. The
admiral in charge of the project received a plaque recognizing his contribu-
tion in bringing modern management techniques to the US Navy. A visiting
team of British experts recommended PERT to the British Admiralty.
However, a later study of the Polaris project suggested a different
interpretation of what really happened. The activities of the specialists were
in fact only loosely coupled to other aspects of the project. The technical
division produced plans and charts that were largely ignored. The manage-
ment meetings served two primary purposes: they were arenas that the
admiral used to publicly chide poor performers, and they were revival
meetings that reinforced the religious fervor around the Polaris project. The
Special Projects Office served as a briefing area in which members of
Congress and other visiting dignitaries were informed about the progress of
Polaris through an impressive series of diagrams and charts that had little to
do with the actual status of the project. The team from the British navy
apparently surmised this on their visit and therefore recommended a similar
approach . . . . (Bolman and Deal 1994: 93–94)
According to Bolman and Deal, symbolic management suggests that: (a) the
interpretive meanings in organizations are more important than the super-
ficial appearances; (b) organizations are more accurately characterized by
ambiguity and uncertainty than by the usual rational problem solving and
decision-making processes; and (c) organizational members attempt to reduce
ambiguity through symbols in order to gain a sense of direction and purpose.
The notion of performance is central to this and as such percolates through to
most organizational activities, from persuading organizational members that
change is unavoidable, to exaggerating the characteristics of a service in front

of the customer. In this respect Goffman links impression management with
the performance offered to the audience:
When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern
with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term
‘sincere’ for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own
performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all his pro-
fessional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his
masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the
fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.
(1966: 98)
The analysis of performance is useful to Strategic Human Resource Develop-

ment because, as Casey argues, ‘Post industrial corporations are now
attempting to design their own organizational culture more explicitly and
more carefully than industrial culture was ever planned’ (1996: 319). Leav-
ing the fabrication of post-industrial experience to one side, it has become
clear that organizations are increasingly turning to scripted performances to
manage the service features of an organization. However, since getting close
to the customer is an unavoidable feature of service encounters, some form of
dramaturgical performance will invariably take place. For example, the
service encounter is a process that usually requires the service provider to
either persuade the customer or to negotiate a desired outcome from the
performance. Because customers have the opportunity to observe the minu-
tiae of service provision (which carries significant interpersonal consequences
including: non-verbal behaviour, linguistic competence, and logical con-
sistency between the development of ideas and definitions), a poor service
encounter may damage a customer relationship because s/he sees through the
act (Grieves and Mathews, 1997).
Performances require the service provider to display three types of
competence:
1 Articulation is the ability of the service producer to articulate clearly the
nature of the service offered and the ability to display listening skills
appropriate to the type of encounter. This usually means being sensitized
to the typical requests of the service encounter as well as displaying the
ability to deal adequately with atypical requests that may occur
sporadically.
2 Linguistic competence, which refers to the ability to display conversa-
tional ability, through knowledge appropriate to the context. This
competence also presupposes a sensitivity to linguistic rules through
which conversations are structured (Garfinkel, 1967; Schegloff, 1972).
3 Logical consistency refers to the speaker’s ability to express a consistent
message enabling the customer to clearly understand the definitions
provided.
The service encounter presents an opportunity to engage in experiential
learning of this type in order to deal with the intangibility of the service
encounter. A good example of this is the type of scripted performance

required by the emergency services. Another is the activity of the change
agent or consultant.
Finally, the dramaturgic analogy enables interventions which (a) critic-
ally examine the need for precise scripts in the performance of an operation
(as in the case of emergency services or healthcare) or innovative perform-
ances in order to deal with unique situations or events and (b) continually
negotiate the culture of the organization and to manage change by involving
the different interests of various stakeholders. Table 5.3 is intended as a
heuristic device for thinking about performances we encounter each day.
Simply fill in your responses to a performance your have encountered
recently. The role of the change agent is to engage employees in a dialogue
about the effectiveness of the performance. In doing this the team will
consider the use of props, the nature of the scripted performance and the
effectiveness of teamwork.
Discourse as metaphor It was noted in Chapter 3 how discourse is a

tool for analysing and explaining culture. The analysis of discourse should be
considered a critical element in enabling people to change their attitudes and
behaviours and in their gaining ownership of the change. Rather than seeing
discourse as something that occurs in the change process, it is useful to also
see change resulting from discourse.
As noted in Chapter 3, discourse reveals certain things about speakers.
For example:
• The complexity of discourse is expressed in various ways. Ideas can be

expressed literally or figuratively. Language can express open and con-
scious intentions or it can reveal involuntary expressions that indicate
hidden ideas or feelings. Analysis of discourse can also reveal rational
thoughts or emotional constructs.
• Metaphors communicate elliptical expressions of legitimate issues by
symbolically expressing cognitive or emotional constructs. We can there-
fore use metaphors to change or influence something (as in a manage-
ment development activity) or we can analyse metaphors as elliptical
expressions about situations in which people find themselves and about
which they may not be consciously aware.
Furthermore, Marshak argues:

With these premises serving as a reminder to constantly pay attention to the
symbolic aspects of communications, a paradoxical principle informs the
diagnostic process: explore literal messages symbolically, and symbolic
messages literally. This principle requires the diagnostic process to remain
open to the potential multiple meanings that may be conveyed by a
seemingly single communication. (1996: 156)
For example, to explore the symbolic – ‘This office is like a prison’ – literally
can be heard as a symbolic way of expressing the range of feelings and
TABLE 5.3 The drama metaphor. Simply fill in your responses to a performance you have encountered recently.
A competent performance Unconvincing performance.

Well crafted. An with minor S/he does not appear to give Laughable. I will not go
Features of the drama inspiration to us all. inconsistencies. everything to it. there again.
What drama is being
performed?
How effective is the drama? Highly aesthetic: refers to Aesthetic: refers to Aesthetic: refers to Aesthetic: refers to
Provide description for your specific codes of . . .
Consultants, Clients and Change Agents

Psychological: refers to Psychological: refers to Psychological: refers to
answers Highly psychological: Emotional: refers to Emotional: refers to Emotional: refers to
refers to
Highly emotional: refers
to
What scripts are used? Well articulated Factual Not factual Not factual
Highly convincing Convincing Unconvincing Unconvincing
Highly emotional Emotional Unemotional Unemotional
What props are used?
What impressions are being

managed?
147
thoughts about the workplace (ibid.: 156). Conversely, the literal statement
‘you can’t tell the truth around here because too many people would get hurt’
symbolically suggests that people in this organization experience truth as a
weapon (ibid.: 157).
The discussion of discourse in Chapter 3 referred to Austin’s (1962)
description of performative utterances to illustrate that any speech act
produces a changed reality and does not simply provide a report. This was
extended by Searle (1976) who classified speech acts into five categories:
assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. This is
useful since these categories constitute the five different ways a change agent
can take action in communication. They are performative, in that each type
of speech act seeks to establish, negotiate or contest a version of reality.
An example of the analysis of Speech Acts in relation to change is
provided by Ford and Ford (1995) who argue that although participants will
engage in a variety of change-related conversations, ‘there are four different
types of conversation that correspond to four different types of interaction in
the intentional change process’ (ibid.: 546). The four types of conversation
referred to are:
1 Conversations that seek to initiate something which use assertions,

directives, commissives and declarations.
2 Conversations that seek understanding and are characterized by
(counter-) assertions and expressives which seek to comprehend the
cause and effect relationships and attempt to specify the conditions of
satisfaction for the change.
3 Performance conversations are conversations as action which focus on
‘doing’ through directives (requests) and commissives (promises)
designed to achieve a desired result;
4 Conversations seeking closure which involve ending something through
expressives and declarations designed to complete the cycle. (ibid. my
emphasis)
Listening to discourses about change, we can identify different dimensions of

talk in relation to the use of power. For example, if a change conversation is
initiated with a directive, then one might reasonably infer an unequal power
relationship exists between the speakers. This may also be the case where
conversations about change fail to seek understanding because counter-
assertives or expressives are curtailed. One might simply ask the question:
‘What is s/he doing with this discourse?’ Alternatively, company documents,
written statements and other verbal exchanges may be the focus for an
interrogation of the political dimensions of talk. It is possible to envisage that
in more enlightened organizations change may be managed through such
critical debates used as a stimulus for change and resulting in a resolution by
identifying opportunities for innovation and organizational learning.
A change agent can use this constructively by using techniques that
involve framing, advocating, illustrating and inquiring (see Fisher et al.
2001). This is illustrated in the case study ‘Reframing the business idea’ in
Chapter 6. The nature of this type of intervention is informed by collabor-
ative learning. This is described as a teaching intervention because: ‘[it] refers
to an analytical and guided learning approach in which change targets
participate in their own reeducation through the active involvement of
change agents’ (Huy, 2001: 607). The change agent will require an ability to
analyse the shifts and tensions in organizational culture and to act as teachers
in order to bring employees’ deep beliefs to the surface. Cognitive dysfunc-
tion may be the root cause of problems or taken-for-granted assumptions
may have unintended consequences (ibid.: 607). The following account
provides some useful examples of this ‘normative-reeducative’ (Chin and
Benne, 1994) method:
For instance, Argyris’s (1993) theory of action method probes and reveals
the incongruence between espoused theories and theories in use. Schein’s
(1992) culture diagnosis method seeks to elicit the tacit, shared assump-
tions of the organization’s culture. With his system dynamics method,
Senge (1990) tries to map the organization’s structure as complex dynamic
systems in order to uncover vicious causal loops and decision makers’
erroneous mental causal attributions. These scholars believe in sound,
cognitive diagnoses of root causes as a prelude to change in behaviors.
They use a normative-reeducative method (Chin & Benne, 1994) and
believe that outsider intervention is necessary to convert the tacit causes of
ineffectiveness into explicit formulations, since employees are cognitively
limited and trapped by their own hidden assumptions. Organizations are
viewed as psychic prisons (Morgan, 1986) that can be liberated by outside
action researchers. Once cognitively liberated, employees are assumed to be
able to learn freely, and this enhances the organzation’s ability to innovate
and adapt to uncertain environments.
To expose relationship difficulties in the client systems, teachers try
uncovering past beliefs and reconstituting them in the present through
retrospective sensemaking (Weick, 1979). These deep beliefs link space and
time together within individuals’ consciousness to reject a sense of stability
and coherence. Challenging these beliefs is tantamount to upsetting a
person’s inner time, and this causes personal distress. Inner time refers to
qualitative time experienced at the subjective level of individual. (Huy,
2001: 607)
CONCLUSION
Traditional texts describing the actions of the OD consultant invariably

begin with a problem-oriented approach to an organizational situation. The
chapter sought to establish Strategic Human Resource Development as pro-
active change from the inside. This type of change requires the change agent
to develop and be responsive to imagination and creative thinking. This is
not change led by senior managers reacting to changes in the external
environment or to dysfunctions within existing practice. Pro-active change
means developing enterprise through human resources. It is strategic because

it develops the strategy of the organization.
To become a change agent requires an awareness of how to achieve
knowledge of ‘conceptual leverage’ and the ability to apply it. To do this, the
chapter considered the weaknesses of management consultancy and sug-
gested that Strategic Human Resource Development is based on process skills
that seek to develop strategy within the organization. The various types of
Strategic Human Resource Development interventions require an ability to
manage the relationship between the client and consultant through process
consultation as well as the ability to use diagnostic skills. Sensitivity to
clients’ needs was considered in relation to the depth of the intervention as
well as to socio-technical and psychodynamic perspectives. This ‘craft knowl-
edge’ is based on four metaphors – machine, organism, drama and discourse
– from which the mode of analysis is linked to the purpose of the
intervention.
FURTHER READING
While the text by Lundberg (1997) provides a useful model of consultancy,

consideration should be given to the competencies of the OD consultant
illustrated by Cummings and Worley (1997). A very comprehensive coverage
of the role of the change agent is given by Hamlin et al. (2001). Because
change agents should be aware of the implications of intervention, atten-
tion should be directed to the concerns of Harrison (1996) which should be
read in conjunction with Blake and Mouton’s (1972) classic work illustrated
in Chapter 1. A very useful text on organizational diagnosis and assessment
is provided by Harrison and Shirom (2001).
Strategic human resource
development interventions 6
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Contracting with the client
• Becoming an internal consultant
• Maintaining equilibrium – managing the systems fits
• The production of meaning: understanding drama
• Discourse and learning conversations
• Strategic learning
• Learning and change
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
I am scared that nothing is real.

That’s called existential angst, or dread, and is, as a rule only a stage on the
way to new consciousness.
(Jostein Gaarder, ‘Sophie’s World’)
INTRODUCTION
In Chapter 5 it was suggested that to become a change agent required an

awareness of how to achieve knowledge of ‘conceptual leverage’ and the
ability to apply it. This chapter extends these ideas with practical examples
that demonstrate the application of knowledge and skills to be acquired by
the Strategic Human Resource Development practitioner or change agent.
The chapter begins with an example of the need to manage the

relationship between the client and consultant through process consultation.
In particular, it demonstrates the dangers of client over-dependence and
reliance on the definition provided by the contracting party. The art of
conceptual leverage means managing the client’s expectations when sound-
ings have been taken from the wider client system. Following this is an
example of the personal changes involved in becoming an internal change
agent. The chapter then moves on to provide examples of change narratives
that illustrate how each of the metaphors – machine, organism, drama and
discourse/learning – have been applied in practice. It is important to note that
in taking these concepts further with some practical examples, their relation-
ship depends upon the culture of the organization. In this sense culture is
viewed not as a component of the organization but as the totality of all
actions, beliefs and values. This is illustrated in Figure 6.1. Thus, how each
of these models is used will be constrained by or will seek to change the
culture. Central to this is the relationship with power, politics and decision-
making, motivation, leadership, role conflict and stress. Finally, strategic
learning is discussed as a flexible solution to the demands of contemporary
organizations.
1 The role of the change agent through five examples which demonstrate
(a) the need to manage the relationship between the client and consult-
ant through process consultation and the danger of client over-
dependence on the definition provided by the contracting party; (b) the
problems associated with becoming an internal change agent; (c) explor-
ing the organismic analogy by managing the systems inputs, the conver-
sion processes and the outputs; (d) exploring the production of meaning
though the drama analogy in the case study, ‘The graveyard of
ambition’.
2 Strategic learning as a flexible solution to the demands of contemporary
organizations. Change today requires the change agent to be aware of
key learning processes. Strategic learning requires managers and
employees to look inward and to critically reflect on their own defensive
reasoning as well as on strategies to develop individual and organiza-
tional learning.
Learning is critical to survival and the change agent will need to know how
and why to apply each of the analytical frameworks identified in the previous
chapter. It is in this sense that the examples provided here reflect only a small
portion of the possibilities for management development. Many more and
very different examples can be found to apply to each paradigm. Each,
however, represents a more flexible alternative to the early twentieth-century
command-and-control, bureaucratic machine model.
SHRD Interventions
FIGURE 6.1

Strategic Human Resource Development interventions
153
CONTRACTING WITH THE CLIENT
The following case study indicates the difficulty of assuming that the client’s
definition of the situation is accurate at the outset of an investigation. In this
case, it is seen that while the client appears to have a clear strategy, in reality
it is based on a partial awareness of how the goals might be achieved. In
addition, the road to achieving the strategy defined by the client ignored
operational issues that need to be addressed. Thus, his attempt to devise and
plan what he considered to be a straightforward change led to a series of
‘emergent’ difficulties that needed to be addressed. These were discovered by
the consultants only when they collected data from the wider client system.
This example refers to external consultants but the method demonstrates
how, once conducted, and with the right training, the organization’s teams
can continue to develop their skills and abilities. Encouraging the develop-
ment of independent learning rather than over dependence of the external
consultant became a major achievement. However, the case also reminds us
that there are times when an external consultant is essential.
Case study 1: process consultation at the George Hotel
Background Set in 15 acres of wooded parkland on the outskirts of

Castlebridge, the George Hotel is an accessible luxury hotel. The location of
the hotel means that it is adequately serviced by road, rail and air. The hotel
building is a seventeenth-century mansion house that has recently been
refurbished and awarded a four-star rating from the AA and RAC. The English
Tourist Board has classified it as a 5 crown awarded hotel.
The hotel was recently bought by new owners. The hotel has a range of
facilities suitable for a variety of customers. Facilities include the following:
• 120 bedrooms;
• conference and banqueting facilities;
• two public bars;
• a leisure club;
• 18-hole golf course.
The hotel has traditionally accommodated a mixture of celebrities, business
travellers and holidaymakers. The restaurant is able to take up to 120 people
and it provides a full à la-carte menu. The leisure club offers a number of
health and fitness facilities including an indoor heated swimming pool, sauna,
solarium and gymnasium. Croquet, golf and tennis can also be played in the
hotel grounds. There are four main conference rooms and eight syndicate
rooms which are well equipped with projectors, video recorders and flip
charts. Functions such as weddings and dinner dances also take place in the
hotel. There are two bars, both of which are open to the public as well as to
hotel residents.
SHRD Interventions  155
The problem as seen by the client The client was the new general
manager of the hotel, Andrew Collins. When he first met with the consultants
he stated that their purpose was to identify ways: ‘to increase profitability in
the area of food and beverage by 10 per cent’. Andrew was of the opinion
that in order to increase profitability it was necessary to attract a new client
base of a lower socio-economic status. Traditionally, the hotel has focused on
the B1 social class group. It was able to do so in the past because it had a
niche market and there were no other luxury hotels in the immediate area.
However, other luxury hotels have recently been built and competition has
increased significantly.
Andrew’s brief to the consultants was constrained by the fact that the
budget allocated to him by the Board of Directors for improving the hotel and
offering a higher quality of service was limited. This meant that the hotel
could not compete at the quality end of the market.
Other incidental issues for improving the quality of service to customers
included teamwork and communication. This is because ‘different parts of the
hotel do not always co-ordinate their activities as effectively as they should’,
he stated. Because ‘the different functions of the hotel have different
managers and different staff’, resulting ‘in their failure to identify with the
customer’s needs as seen holistically by the hotel’. As an example of ineffect-
ive teamwork he cited a breakdown in communication in which the restaurant
ran out of paper napkins because the conference staff, having already used
the linen napkins, proceeded to use the reserve supply of paper napkins
without informing the restaurant and without ordering more from the
supplier. Another aspect of Andrew’s strategy was his desire to attract local
people who lived near the restaurant as their obvious first choice. Therefore,
Andrew’s main strategy was to do the following:
1 Target customers from a lower socio-economic group.

2 Attract local people to use the restaurant which would also be run as a
separate business.
3 Develop teamwork throughout the hotel in order to identify with the
needs of the business and in so doing address the customer’s needs.
His first strategy was therefore to develop the thinking of the managers.
The consultants’ strategy Further discussions with Andrew Collins

revealed the existence of a number of customer satisfaction measures. These
were designed to identify the perceived level of service provided within the
hotel. The consultants decided to use this existing information in order to
obtain a snapshot of customer perception. This information was collected
from (a) a mystery customer programme; and (b) a questionnaire collected
from bedrooms, the restaurant, conference and leisure facilities.
In addition, the consultants originally considered undertaking a financial
appraisal of the last five years. A study of recording stock control and wastage
would have identified inefficient ways of working, or recording practices and
suggested possibilities for improvement. This would have provided the finan-
cial background information necessary to address the problem defined by the
client.
The consultants recognized that points 1 and 2 in Andrew’s strategy were
directly related to possible ways of increasing profitability but point 3 was only
indirectly related to the problem definition but its effectiveness would,
nevertheless, determine the success of the strategy. As a result, they con-
sidered that point 3 – to develop teamwork – might be the logical place to
start with a training programme designed to ‘increase profitability’. Conse-
quently, the consultants decided to begin the process of inquiry by consulting
with the wider client system by means of interviews and questionnaires.
Preliminary findings of the wider client system Of the seven

department managers interviewed, four had not been invited to participate in
the development of the new strategic plan for the hotel. The three heads who
had been involved in this long-term planning were the newest members of
the management team. Only the four older ‘time served’ department man-
agers could quote the mission statement (which was: ‘Our mission is to
exceed your expectations’) but considered it to be ‘relatively meaningless’ and
‘banal’.
Two of the department heads stated that there was a ‘blame culture’ and
that no one accepted responsibility when things went wrong. They said that it
was not uncommon to hear people say ‘this has nothing to do with me’.
Another head of department stated, ‘two subcultures are beginning to
develop in the hotel, one of which was based on the past and the other based
on a future’. This clearly reflected the four heads who represented the old
team and the three heads who were part of the new team. One of the new
heads said that a ‘culture of inflexibility’ had developed and that staff needed
a ‘good shake-up’. By contrast, the four older department heads stated that
low morale was one of the major obstacles to change and that the hotel had
‘no buzz’ about it. The four older heads agreed that the low morale was
caused mainly by exceedingly low wages at about, or just above, the
minimum wage. But, because of the increased competition they felt that there
was little chance of increasing wages. Hence an intractable problem had
developed. As one of them, paraphrasing Hertzberg, stated, ‘It [money] may
not be a motivator but it is the most important hygiene factor in this industry
– it determines who you get, how long they stay and why they move on to
other things.’ He went on, ‘the amount of training given to new staff is
determined by how long you can keep them and this is now a high turnover
hotel in a high turnover industry’. Another problem was the hours staff were
expected to work. On some occasions staff were called in to work but never
knew in advance if they would work a full shift or whether they would be sent
home early as a result of slack business. On other occasions, when business
was brisk, they were often kept hours longer than their normal finishing time.
This uncertainty about knowing the hours they were to work was a major
source of dissatisfaction.
In addition, the mystery customer programme indicated that standards

across departments varied. This appeared to be particularly the case in the
bars and restaurants. Service in the bar was said to be slow and expensive.
The beer was criticized for being badly kept and customers were often kept
waiting due to the limited number of staff on duty at any one time. Training
was generally done on the job and in front of the customer and often carried
out at high speed causing the new member of staff some anxiety in meeting
the demands of both the customer and her more experienced colleague.
Interviews with staff also revealed that quality standards throughout the
hotel were not written down. Instead, they were passed on by word of
mouth. A snapshot of perceptions across departments suggested that quality
standards varied according to which head of department they were working
for.
Therefore, the preliminary investigation of managers and their staff
seemed to suggest contradictions and underlying dynamics that might not
only impede any effective changes to the improvement strategy but might, if
they could be addressed, provide a more effective strategy in the long run. In
the attempt to avoid bias these were summarized as ‘working facts’. For
example:
• Four of the department managers felt they were not part of the manage-
ment team.
• Three of the newer managers felt that the management team worked
well together.
• Employees, generally, obtained very low wages.
• Employees, generally, were uncertain about the number of hours they
would work on any one shift.
• Quality standards across the hotel varied and were not written down.
• Training was ineffective, did not satisfy staff, and detracted from the
quality of service perceived by the customer.
The need to refocus the problem The original problem statement

identified by the new general manager, Andrew Collins, was ‘to increase the
profitability in the area of food and beverage by 10 per cent’. This can be
regarded as a surface intervention as defined by Harrison (1996). The
consultants began by investigating the various systems at the George Hotel,
including the financial control system and the quality system, and wanted to
know more about service expectations which would inform them about how
various services were being delivered. However, the interviews of the man-
agers and staff suggested that there were deeper issues to address which
would impact on any solution recommended. This required an examination of
interpersonal relationships and the extent to which employees considered
themselves to be ‘valued resources’ involved in the process of service delivery
(this is even more important in service encounters where staff are in front line
contact with customers and where the products are intangible). The inter-
views with managers and staff therefore revealed dysfunctions that were likely
to inhibit a change strategy that focused simply on a 10 per cent increase in

profitability linked to food and beverage.
In addition to the discovery of dysfunctions that would clearly detract
from effective team-work, a series of critical incidents were identified. In
August 2001 the restaurant manager left unexpectedly. As a solution, the
managing director, Andrew Collins, decided to give responsibility for running
the restaurant to the staff and at the same time increased their wages by £1
per hour. However, this caused major discontent to the remaining staff in the
hotel who had previously been told they had to regard themselves as a
team.
As a result, the consultants decided it was necessary to re-examine the
original problem statement. They began with a task-related issue which
developed into what appeared to be a more deep-seated socio-emotional
concern with the effectiveness of the organization and the relationships
within it. It was therefore agreed that the original aims and objectives had
changed. As a result, the consultants approached Andrew Collins to discuss
their concerns with the original remit and present a revision to it. They
concluded that they needed to reappraise the situation and change the focus
of the consultancy.
Their primary concern was the healthy development of the organization
and they argued that, in order for the objectives to be embraced (which
included the original goal of increasing productivity by 10 per cent), senior
management needed to develop and share the new vision of the organization
with all staff. In order to do this, it was necessary to share concerns and
develop a vision with all managers in order to ensure they developed the idea
collectively rather than as two distinct groups. This was to be followed by
communicating the vision, asking employees to identify opportunities, includ-
ing productivity bonuses and pay increases to all staff, training and personal
development resulting from the effort and commitment they were prepared
to invest in the development of their own organization.
Postscript The top team set about the task of investigating its external
environment and considered the position of the hotel over the next five years.
They agreed to change the organization structure to a flatter style. An
examination of the industry’s external environment found that other factors
needed to be considered. The general manager’s ‘value for money’ focus was
informed by data from the industry (which reported trends throughout the UK
suggesting a growth in both the ‘value for money’ and ‘luxury’ markets of the
hotel industry) that suggested the hotel needed to attract more tourists rather
than rely on their history of attracting celebrities. Furthermore, a value chain
analysis illustrated the interconnectedness of the organization’s strategy and
its operational processes. This called into question a complete re-examination
of its human resource strategy and the processes by which it managed its
staff.
A new mystery customer survey set criteria against which the hotel’s
performance could be measured. There has since been a steady improvement
in standards within the hotel. In addition, an annual employee survey has

been introduced. This has revealed, in particular, the need to manage change
in a more integrated way by involving all staff in the process. Deficiencies in
communications have been identified and small teams of staff have been
given the task of solving communication problems. Quality standards have
also been identified for all areas – once again by staff working in teams – and
regular training has been introduced in order to maintain the standards and,
where possible, improve the quality of service offered to customers.
By the end of the first year, February 2002, profitability was informed
more by efficiencies and by focusing on raising quality standards. Wastage on
perishables, such as food and drink, was reduced. The number of returning
customers increased by 5 per cent. Variations in standards were eliminated.
The payment of part-time staff increased to well beyond the minimum wage.
Profitability increased by 23 per cent which represented 13 per cent more than
originally expected by Andrew Collins.
BECOMING AN INTERNAL CONSULTANT
In Chapter 5 we noted that process consultation requires the change agent to

engage organization members in diagnosis and to collect and analyse data
through a variety of methodological techniques, including the use of statis-
tics, survey techniques and force field analysis. Central to this is the ability to
‘find your feet’ by developing new skills and new knowledge by involving the
organization’s members at various stages of the intervention. The following
case study ‘Becoming an internal change agent in the National Health
Service’ illustrates this.
Case study 2: discovering the role of internal change

agent in the National Health Service
I was appointed as a project manager on secondment to review the theatre

processes in an NHS hospital and their link to all specialities. The advantages
and disadvantages of being an internal change agent became apparent very
soon. Having managed theatres was obviously beneficial when reviewing
theatre processes. Relationships were already established with most of the
staff, and I was aware of the informal structures. I was respected by staff,
especially clinicians, who were the major stakeholders. However, being an
internal change agent rather than an external one can also be disadvantag-
eous. Although I no longer officially work for the division of anaesthesia/
theatres, I feel I am still seen to be working for theatres, thus staff from other
departments may feel I am biased towards theatre objectives only.
To ensure the different boundaries are managed, I have had to ensure
that I effectively communicate with and involve all the relevant stakeholders,
informing them initially of my role and objectives, sharing the theatre

problems with them, and also discovering their problems. By demonstrating
motivation and enthusiasm at all times, selling ideas to gain support by
presenting information clearly, and ensuring information is accurate, progress
was made. I have used these skills, along with persevering to sell ideas and
gain support from those opposing any change, continuously. However, this
has been time-consuming but critical to managing change. I have also had to
deploy political tactics, such as building internal relationships and alliances. I
developed my persuasion skills further in order to influence key stakeholders,
especially clinicians. Empathy became essential when managing cross-cultural
issues. I discovered how important it was to be sensitive to the needs of
people in other departments and to explore any prejudicial judgements I may
have made in the past with responsibility for one area only.
One particular theatre process that required reviewing was the theatre list
planning process. This was influenced by the external political agenda in
relation to waiting times and waiting lists. During my first few months in the
post, I obtained a good deal of data from the Theatreman system regarding
theatre utilization. I conducted interviews with the surgeons to identify what
their own system was for planning lists. Having documented and obtained
information regarding the production of lists, I then produced an impact
analysis chart to highlight the problems associated with the lack of a
standardized system for effectively managing the theatre lists against the time
available. The major reasons could then be identified using Pareto analysis. In
a six-month period 157 operations had been cancelled. Furthermore, this
revealed other impacts such as a high level of anxiety from patients and
incidents of complaints. Problems included: no bed available, lack of theatre
time, the patient cancelled at short notice, late starts and delays, poor
planning, etc. This was presented to stakeholders – surgeons, anaesthetists,
divisional staff, theatre and ward staff. I involved many of the ward and
theatre staff in the collection of the data to establish a degree of ownership
and validity. The graphs and statistics highlighted the problems.
After six months in the post I persuaded two surgeons, who were chiefs
of service, to trial a new list planning procedure by using their average
operating times as a means of avoiding both over- and under-utilization of
theatre sessions. During a theatre briefing, I informed staff of the trial we
were to run and highlighted that this was a major breakthrough for them,
because it gave them an opportunity to take control of the over-running of
lists. This had always been a major complaint from the theatre staff. However,
to ‘sell’ the trial to surgeons, their own late starts had to be addressed and in
order for it to work, the theatre managers had to ensure lists commenced on
time. The theatre staff, along with ward staff, identified three performance
standards to work towards (theatre list will commence on time; patients will
be in the anaesthetic room 5 minutes prior to list start time; all areas of
patient documentation will be completed as accurately as possible). These
were placed on the theatre notice walls.
My role as an internal change agent already feels more positive and

collaborative and open relationships have emerged. Working together to
meet the standards, rather than blaming each other when things go wrong, is
now much more apparent.
MAINTAINING EQUILIBRIUM – MANAGING THE

SYSTEMS FITS
An organization that cannot adapt is unlikely to survive. When organizations

are seen as analogous to organisms, the focus must be on the vitality of the
inputs, the conversion processes and the outputs. An organization’s needs are
not met when examples of effectiveness, or declining health, begin to
emerge.
At some point decisions will be made about the factors that indicate an
unhealthy state. The most obvious one is financial. When the sub-systems
(task, structure, people, technology, management) become uncoupled, devia-
tions from conformance occur. This will lead to the search for dysfunctions
and an examination of critical processes beginning with inputs and ending
with outputs.
The open systems framework of input–conversion–output can be
applied to organizations. When changes in one sub-system occur, they will
cause subsequent changes elsewhere in the system. If this is not managed
carefully then it will have consequences for the way the other elements
perform.
The following example demonstrates the role of the change agent in this
process. In this organization there is a need to analyse and redesign work
processes.
Case study 3: improving processes by examining

functional inter-relationships
Machine Products manufacture gearbox components for diesel engines. It

employs approximately 300 people. The company has two sites: a head office
which employs a wide range of people who are generally well educated and
enthusiastic about their work, and a factory site which employs semi-skilled
local men who are generally disinterested in the products of the company and
who have an instrumental attitude to work, seeing the wage as the only
reward.
The problem The senior management team became concerned about

the performance of the factory. Objectives were suggested by the executive
team and an external consultant indicated specific changes to relationships
and tasks. The objectives were:
1 To review and improve formal communications within the organization.

2 To restructure the organization and to review teamwork practices.
3 To review leadership across all departments.
4 To create a quality focus across the company.
In relation to the need to create a quality focus, a change agent – John – was
appointed and given responsibility for improving process control and review
procedures for IS09001 in the factory. John identified a mixture of facts and
perceptions that needed to be tackled. The facts were:
1 Wastage within the factory was costing the company approximately

£32K a month.
2 Observation and records confirmed differences in the work standards of
different individuals.
3 Processes were not standardized and resulted in repeated problems.
4 Management made all decisions and cascaded the results down to
employees.
Perceptions suggested:
1 The existence of a ‘them and us’ attitude between the office and the
factory which appeared to influence attitudes to work.
2 Production employees appeared complacent and showed little respons-
ibility for the quality of their work.
3 Production employees were isolated by the technology and appeared
alienated from the products and from the success of the company.
The factory environment was highly mechanized and the production employ-
ees were seen as unskilled workers. Their work involved the performance of
repetitive tasks on an assembly line.
The change strategy In consultation with team leaders, John selected a

team to recommend a change strategy. Ten production employees were
selected at random with certain conditions:
• Each should have worked for the company for at least six months.
• None should have received warnings on their work records.
• Each must be willing to help and be interested in the challenge offered.
The team had authorization to experiment and make changes to the design of
the process. The planning process took two months and consisted of analys-
ing the production output, staff rotas, levels of training.
Potential obstacles to implementation and strategies to overcome

them Before analysing the task the team identified three potential
obstacles to performance. First, many managers did not want to relinquish
control. To overcome this the team was enlarged to include a manager who
would keep other managers informed about the activities of the team. In this
way it was made clear that no changes would threaten their role. Second,
production employees felt that they did their jobs and that quality control was
the responsibility of the supervisors. This attitude was tackled through a series
of meetings which addressed the responsibilities of everyone. A solution could
only emerge when the team considered the restructuring of the job with the
redesign of tasks and processes. Since this team was representative of
production employees, John suggested that the redesign and implementation
of a new methodology would be placed in the hands of the team. Third,
discussions with production employees indicated that they did not wish to
take on extra responsibility without reward. To address this the team put
forward a proposal to senior management that any measured improvements
in productivity would be rewarded by paying bonuses related to increased
profitability.
Identifying critical problems The team then set about identifying

critical problems. To do this they constructed a cause and effect diagram
which produced some useful insights into the variety of issues that contrib-
uted to the problem of wastage within the factory.
The root causes revealed that systems were defective because there was
frequent variation in standards set and accepted by different operators.
Decisions were made by supervisors who were too remote from the immedi-
ate task, operators received no feedback on their performance other than
negative comments about defects. The structure and materials revealed that
the job was rigidly defined and the quality of incoming materials from
suppliers was often defective. The process or method revealed that as a result
of poor systems and inadequate control of materials, work was often
repeated or delayed in the attempt to make corrections. In addition, the
methods of manufacture had been designed ad hoc over many years and
needed to be reviewed and redesigned. Discussions revealed the need to
understand the importance of internal customers in order to eliminate
misunderstandings and improve the service. This was particularly important
between the office and the factory. Finally, tasks needed to become more
coherent in order that production operators could identify with the end
product. This required the elimination of repetitive and monotonous work.
The root causes are illustrated in Figure 6.2.
Improving system fits Once the problems were identified, the next
step for the team was to identify opportunities for improvement. They began
by producing a flowchart of the current process and from this they identified
improvement opportunities. This is illustrated in Table 6.1. The improvements
carried costs in relation to training, personal development and time required
for review meetings. These costs were agreed with senior management and
measured against the costs of the overall problem. By the end of the first year
the savings to the company had averaged out to £21,500 per month.
164
Systems People
‘them and us’ attitude

Variation in standards
Tasks were not seen as a coherent whole
Decision-makers too remote
Tasks were seen as repetitive and boring
No feedback on performance
No discretion over control or pace
Wastage
Structure of job is rigid Work repeated too often

Quality of incoming materials vary Methods design ad hoc
Structure
Process/method
and materials
FIGURE 6.2
Cause and effect diagram identifying wastage within factory
TABLE 6.1 Opportunities for improvement
Systems People Structure and materials Process/method
Identify work standards through Introduce personal development Move to multi-skilled teams in Methods to be redesigned by
training programme to enhance self-esteem order to reduce repetition and team following monthly review
boredom. Pace of work in hands
of the team who set targets for
improvement
Decisions to be made at source Training to relate tasks to Team to inspect quality of Any repeat work to be subject to
to (1) empower staff, (2) finished product. External and incoming materials monthly reviews to eliminate
minimize the costs of defects and internal customers involved in cause
(3) reduce the activities of the demonstrating the function of
inspection department the product
Feedback on performance will no Measure process improvements
SHRD Interventions
longer be provided by supervisor and feed into review
but by team
Change reward structure with

bonuses related to targets for the
type of work

165
THE PRODUCTION OF MEANING: UNDERSTANDING

DRAMA
As the previous chapter indicated, the metaphor of drama is concerned with

the production of meaning in organizations rather than a set of rational
formulas for organizational success. Indeed, the elegance of this metaphor
turns the very idea of rationality on its head by showing that what really
matters is how people feel and what they really think as opposed to what
they say in public. The following account demonstrates one of the most
important change interventions. It is important precisely because it chal-
lenges the taken-for-granted assumptions of organizational life. The account
demonstrates that if managers manage and planners shape the future and
administrators administer, then why are the tasks within such organizations
carried out so ineffectively? The case study provided – ‘The graveyard of
ambition’ – resulted from an activity that required participants to analyse
their own organization through a literary genre. They were asked to portray
their organization as they really felt it to be in order to identify some of the
underlying tensions and tacit frameworks that inform the judgements that
people make. To do this they were required to write a story using a fictional
device. They were asked to identify a novel or film they were familiar with
and use the narrative to tell a story about their own organization. Various
genres were offered such as: journey (usually transformational and often
spiritual), political thriller (used to portray intrigue and complexity), western
(typically used to portray good versus evil), science fiction (often used to
create an image of the future which is often cast as a warning), a game (used
to demonstrate the function of strategy, tactics and personal struggle to
overcome the odds).
Essentially the drama metaphor is used to explore and improve perform-
ance, teamwork, the gap between rhetoric and reality and the meanings
behind the product or service offered to the organization. Towards the end of
the following extract you will notice how the writer has used this as a
discussion for making changes to the organization. This, of course, is much
easier to do with teams or groups of people than it is with an entire
organization, since the change agent can use this technique to inform
strategy.
Case study 4: the graveyard of ambition
Step one The novel is set in 1998 in ‘Dulltown’ No. 103 Sanctum,
otherwise known as the ‘graveyard of ambition’. The No. 103 Sanctum
comprises the Inner Sanctum, the Outer Sanctum and the Lower Sanctum.
The Inner Sanctum represents the Corporation and is divided into eight
Superpowers led by the ‘Inner Sanctees’. Their position is one of power,
privilege, and secrecy. They huddle frequently together in the Corporate

Room. They reside in the ‘Corridors of Power’.
The language frequently used is ‘recognition’, ‘corporate’, ‘authority’,
‘discipline’, ‘procedures’, ‘protocols’, ‘rules’, ‘secrecy’, ‘regulations’, ‘condi-
tions’, and not least of all ‘do as I say not as I do’ (I will not say this directly, but
you must infer it implicitly).
These words are expected to be cultivated and internalized by the ‘Outer
Sanctum’. They are charged with the job of ‘educating’ the Lower Sanctum or
the masses at the bottom of the pyramid. This must be done in such a way
that the Lower Sanctum are unaware of the continual stream of brainwashing
– but of course they are!
The Outer Sanctum comprise a hundred Sanctees who have long for-
gotten how to exude a true ‘sanctimonious’ air – a corporate value. Instead
they are a core of Sanctees who work 9–5 every day in an unquestioning,
apathetic way and who protect the Inner Sanctum from the true feelings of
the masses. This is also in their own interest.
The Lower Sanctum, representing some 2,000, get on with their work.
They know, or have learned to their cost, that they must be ‘seen and not
heard’. They speak pure ‘Sanctspeake’ a mumbled, jittery, hesitant, hurried
speech exchanged in coffee lounges and in quiet corners. They take orders
from the ‘Outer Sanctum’, many of whom are known as ‘Suits’. They rarely
see the Inner Sanctum but their presence is felt nevertheless. They know that
to cross the ‘suits’ could result in dismissal, ‘movement’, ‘scapegoating’ or
suicide. Their tactics for survival are to maintain a low profile, to appear busy
and to use the right ‘buzz-led’ phrases exalting the agreed ‘sanctimonious’
speak.
The Sanctum is not without its enemies – consisting of the ‘Lower
Sanctum United’, a group set up to meet the criteria laid down by the Upper
and Over Sanctum but detested secretly by the Inner Sanctum. Lucy Cannon,
known as the ‘poisonous dwarf’, and Arthur Trotsky lead the Lower Sanctum
United. Juliet Scapegoat is the ‘heroine’, an Outer Sanctum Sanctee of the
upper middle variety, and Winsome-Loosem is of the same order.
The visit Mr Thrashem from the Upper and Over Sanctum is due to visit
Dulltown No. 103 Sanctum.
His purpose is to be ‘seen and heard’. The press, photographers and TV
will be there in significant numbers.
Mr Thrashem is important to the Inner Sanctum who are all scurrying
around. When they bump into each other, a sort of high-pitched voice
emanates ‘recognition’, ‘must be corporate’ and everyone looks even more
busy!
Mr Thrashem is opening a sub-unit in Dulltown and Sanctee No. 2 will be
there with his minions. Minions 1 and 2 are particularly ferocious and
everyone, even their peers, always speak ‘sanctimonious’ in their presence. It’s
a sort of unwritten rule. To get Sanctee No. 2 on your back is ‘career
limiting’.
Juliet Scapegoat and Winsome-Loosem are friends and behind the scenes
have organized a programme for the masses which they call ‘Return to the
Real World’. Ten people from the Lower Sanctum have successfully completed
this. These were organized in conjunction with Lucy Cannon.
Lucy Cannon has ‘big ideas!’ Cannon et al. have links with the Upper
Sanctum United. Without a care in the world Cannon et al. go direct for talks
to the Upper Sanctum United. They have links to Mr Thrashem et al. direct!
Without reference to Dulltown and the Inner Sanctum, Mr Thrashem is to
present the ‘Return to the Real World’ sanctees (Lower Sanctum) with their
Certificates! Lucy Cannon liaises with Miss Scapegoat who is to finalize the
arrangements with the Inner Sanctum! Cannon et al. make themselves scarce.
The Corporate balloon at its hottest hits the proverbial fan!
Miss Scapegoat and Winsome-Loosem find themselves at the centre of
attention and with nowhere to hide. Winsome-Loosem, who is used to
political infighting and who thrives on conflict, finds a way out! Miss
Scapegoat awaits her fate.
Lucy Cannon finds herself questioned by Upper Sanctee No. 3 with
Minion Control. This has the appearance of informality but you should ‘never
judge the book by its cover’ and all the Upper Sanctum are poised and eager
for feedback. ‘Feedback’ being a form of language largely used by the Upper
Sanctum for their exclusive use.
The Upper Sanctum huddle even more closely over meetings such as the
Upper Sanctum Meeting and Upper Sanctum subgroup. They devise a cun-
ning plan using the rational approach to decision-making – New Rule One!
Rule 1 is called ‘Co-ordination of Upper and Over Sanctum and Crown
United visits’.
Rule 2 All visits must be co-ordinated by No. 1 Upper Sanctee.
Rule 3 This applies to everyone (particularly the Outer and Lower Sanctum
but formally this is not emphasized. It may upset the delicate ‘ba-ba-
balance’ of power and spoil splendid relations with Upper and Over
Representatives).
A new order will be circulated by Minion Control as a matter of priority.
Lucy Cannon et al. also meet and, true to their counter-culture unit,
devise further interventions.
Step two
• The plot is based on rigid hierarchical structure with tight controls
emanating primarily from the top of the organization.
• It has by necessity many rules and regulations which provide a large
organization with a consistent framework.
• The Taylorist approach, however, is also overlaid by a strong political
dimension. It is a government body and is in the public domain.
• In addition, professional bodies and trade unions are prevalent as semi-
counter cultures which modify the extremes of regulation.
This story gives a picture of a visit by a Senior Parliamentarian and a strong
trade unionist influence.
Changes to be made
1 The Inner Sanctum should identify its values and the symbolism of its
actions. It should involve entrenched, apathetic middle managers in some
of the decision-making to break down the barriers between them.
2 Middle managers should be valued for their contributions and should be
encouraged to have ownership.
3 Jargon words should be unpacked so that there is shared understanding
of their implicit and explicit meanings.
4 Senior Managers should ‘walk the talk’, to be visible, available and
approachable.
5 Lucy Cannon represents the strong counter-culture which is in direct
proportion to the dark side of the culture. This should be recognized and
acted upon positively. Lucy is a powerful informal, political leader. Her
links to the Parliamentarian should have been anticipated by the Inner
Sanctum. As soon as dialogue was detected, Cannon et al. should have
been involved more formally to minimize any misrepresentation of the
organization.
6 Miss Scapegoat should have insisted that Lucy Cannon take responsibility
for her actions and report directly to the Senior Team. Not to do so was a
misjudgement on her part.
7 Winsome-Loosem does not exist although elements of his character
represent ‘Minion Control’.
Summary The culture of the organization is very much ‘do as I say’ and
‘don’t question too much’. There needs to be more openness and risk taking.
Senior managers need to identify with staff, presenting the values of the
organization. These need to be a ‘lived-out’ experience especially by senior
and middle managers. The organization will remain political but involvement
of the trade unions may limit the sabotaging effects on the organization.
All names and descriptions are of course entirely coincidental.
STRATEGIC LEARNING
What conclusion can we come to regarding Strategic Human Resource

Development in organizations today? In times of turbulence Ashby’s law of
requisite variety provides a potential direction. This principle states that for a
system to preserve its integrity and survive, its rate of learning must at least
match the rate of change in its environment (Ashby, 1956).
The first two models for Strategic Human Resource Development
interventions identified in the previous chapter – the machine and the
organism reflect four basic values: (a) to maintain unilateral control; (b) to
maximize ‘winning’ and minimize ‘losing’; (c) to suppress negative feelings;
and (d) to be as ‘rational’ (defining clear objectives and evaluating their
behaviour in terms of whether or not they have achieved them) as possible.

The problem is that these values are created to avoid embarrassment, threat
or feeling vulnerable or incompetent. As such, this is regarded as defensive
reasoning since it ‘encourages individuals to keep private the premises,
inferences, and conclusions that shape their behavior and to avoid testing
them in a truly independent, objective fashion’ (Argyris, 1997: 206).
In discussing an example of defensive reasoning Argyris cites managers
who continually attribute the problem elsewhere rather than recognize their
own contribution to it:
Because the attributions that go into defensive reasoning are never really
tested, it is a closed loop, remarkably impervious to conflicting points of
view. The inevitable response to the observation that somebody is reason-
ing defensively is yet more defensive reasoning. With the case team, for
example, whenever anyone pointed out the professionals’ defensive behav-
ior to them, their initial reaction was to look for the cause in somebody else
– clients who were so sensitive that they would have been alienated if the
consultants had criticized them or a manager so weak that he couldn’t have
taken it had the consultants raised their concerns with him. In other words,
the case team members once again denied their own responsibility by
externalizing the problem and putting it on someone else . . . Needless to
say, such a master program inevitably short-circuits learning. And for a
number of reasons unique to their psychology, well-educated professionals
are especially susceptible to this. (ibid.: 207)
If these are inevitable human behaviours, then how can organizations break
out of this vicious circle? Argyris’ first point is motivational. That is, ‘despite
the strength of defensive reasoning, people genuinely strive to produce what
they intend’ because they ‘value acting competently’ and because their ‘self-
esteem is intimately tied up with behaving consistently and performing
effectively’ (ibid.: 207). His second point is about method. That is, individ-
uals ‘can be taught how to recognize the reasoning they use when they design
and implement their actions’ and they can begin by identifying the ‘incon-
sistencies between their espoused and actual theories of action’ (ibid.: 207).
Inevitably, as with all human learning, there is no quick fix or recipe for
change. There is, however, a growing awareness among practitioners that
organizational learning and change are intertwined and need to begin with
reflective awareness. As Argyris argues, the first step is for managers at the
top to critically examine and change their own theories-in-use.
Organizational learning provides a flexible solution to the demands of
contemporary organizations. The point here is that change requires aware-
ness of key learning processes. Organizational learning represents the organ-
izational responses to turbulence by creating solutions to the daily routine of
unforeseen events that create everyday problems. In this respect Shrivastava
(1983) has suggested that there are three kinds of learning for the organiza-
tion to deal with: (a) ‘adaptive learning’ which identifies critical processes in
the external environment, thereby bringing about emergent changes from
new knowledge about the environment; (b) learning to influence the organ-
ization’s theories-in-use (Shrivastava calls this ‘assumption sharing’ and
changing) as defined originally by Argyris and Schön (1978); and (c) learn-
ing that develops a wider ‘knowledge base’.
Argyris has argued for more than a decade that most companies have
difficulty addressing the learning dilemma. That is, most are not even aware
that it exists or if they have some interest, they often ‘misunderstand what
learning is and how to bring it about’ (Argyris, 1997: 201). A major problem
is that learning is defined too narrowly as mere problem-solving, ‘so they
focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment’
(ibid.: 201). Although he regards solving problems as an important activity, it
is not essentially strategic learning. Strategic learning therefore requires
managers and employees to look inward, to reflect critically on their own
behaviour and identify the ways ‘they often inadvertently contribute to the
organization’s problems’. In particular, they must learn how the very way
they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in
its own right (ibid.: 201). Argyris call this problem ‘defensive reasoning and
the doom loop’ by which he refers to the essential contradiction between
what people say (action) and what they do (behaviour). This is evident in the
case of: ‘The graveyard of ambition’.
LEARNING AND CHANGE
As Lorange has argued, ‘In an entirely stable world, learning would be

largely a luxury which one would not necessarily have to pursue system-
atically, and certainly not one on which to spend organizational resources
extensively’ but with the risk of becoming obsolete and no longer being
relevant to one’s customers there are strong pressures to learn (1996: 5).
Therefore, at both the individual and organizational levels, learning has to be
inspired by change (ibid.: 5). That is to say, critical factors impacting either at
the individual or the organizational level need to be identified, managed and
reflected upon as a process. Consequently, because organizational environ-
ments are changing rapidly ‘one might perhaps say that change, as a
phenomenon, represents the very rationale for the necessity to learn’
(ibid.: 5). The turbulence experienced in recent years has been depicted by a
series of change-related metaphors such as Charles Handy’s, ‘the age of
unreason’ (1990), Vaill’s description of ‘permanent white water’ (1989),
Morgan’s ‘riding the waves of change’ (1988), and Stacey’s ‘managing the
unknowable’ (1992). However, because of the need to operate in turbulent
environments, contemporary organizations will have to consider newer and
more imaginative ways of developing employees and changing their organ-
izations. Personal development and management development will require a
greater focus on types of learning.
Individual learning
Individual learning has been identified through a number of models such as
Kolb’s cycle of (a) concrete experience; (b) reflection; (c) abstract con-
ceptualization; and (d) active experimentation. Argyris (1989; 1991; 1993),
on the other hand, has been more concerned to develop a theory of learning
through a recognition of an individual’s espoused theories, theories-in-use
and defensive justifications. Another direction was taken by Senge (1990) to
identify ‘mental models’ based on underlying beliefs, habits and values
through which people define reality. Thus by challenging these, individuals
can either modify or transform their ideas.
Organizational learning
Argyris and Schön (1978) suggested the term ‘organizational learning’ refer to
an organization’s adaptability to a changing environment. Learning in organi-
zations can be said to require the development of both systems and processes
in order that changes in the external (and internal) environments filter
through to attitudes, procedures and practices in a way that facilitates con-
stant review of operating norms at a variety of levels throughout the organiza-
tion. Organizational growth appears to be a determinant of organizational
learning and as Appelbaum and Reichart point out, ‘In the early stages of an
organization’s existence, organizational learning is often synonymous with
individual learning because the organization consists of a small group of
people and has minimal structure. As an organization grows, a distinction
between individual and organizational learning evolves’ (1997: 228).
Organizational learning is not the same as individual learning since the
sum of the parts do not equal the collaborative effort of the team. This
follows Senge’s comment that a team of committed managers with individual
IQs above 120 can have a collective IQ of 63 as a result of their learning
disability (Senge, 1990: 9). Current literature suggests that there is no defini-
tive agreed definition of a learning organization since it is not possible to
identify an organizational blueprint. Marsick and Watkins, for example,
argue that ‘the learning organization is not a prescription, but rather a
template for the examination of current practices’ (1994: 354).
For March and Olsen (1976), organizational learning begins with indi-
vidual learning. Their account views organizational learning in behaviouristic
terms as a ‘stimulus-response system’ in which individuals’ beliefs inform
organizational decision-making. They identified four learning conditions
which inhibited learning:
1 Role-constrained learning which occurred when the constraints of the
role limited the development of knowledge (typical of bureaucratic sit-
uations in which rules and regulations prevented individuals from inte-
grating their learning with others).
2 Superstitious learning which is based on untested belief and inference
rather than fact (this represents a failure to establish causal relationships
between facts and leads either to partial misinterpretation, or to the

development of an entire mythology).
3 Audience learning which results from the separation of learning from
doing.
4 Ambiguous learning which results from an inconsistency between exter-
nal reality (established or potential fact) and individuals’ beliefs. (see
Bedeian, 1984)
The learning organization
The concept of the learning organization is summed up by Senge’s phrase

‘metanoia’, or a shift in mindset. This is ‘the basic meaning of a “learning
organization” – an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to
create its future’ (Senge, 1990: 13). In order to give the concept greater
tangibility, Garvin (1993) argued that the learning organization should be
‘meaningful, manageable and measurable’. Others, however, have argued
that the concept of learning organization should be viewed as a metaphor
rather than a distinct type of structure, (Drew and Smith, 1995; Pedler et al.,
1991). Drew and Smith suggest that a useful way of thinking about the
metaphor is as a ‘social system’ whose members have learned conscious
communal processes: (a) for continually generating, retaining and leveraging
individual and collective learning to improve performance of the organiza-
tional system in ways important to all stakeholders; and (b) by monitoring
and improving performance (Drew and Smith, 1995). Their approach
attempts to relate permanent change to learning by suggesting a model
consisting of three elements: ‘focus’, ‘will’ and ‘capability’. Focus refers to a
clear sense of direction and vision. It is ‘rooted in the shared mental maps of
the top teams’ and in the ‘shared vision throughout the organization’. It is
useful to distinguish between a necessary ‘high degree of focus’ which
‘requires a well-developed knowledge of the business and an extraordinary
understanding of critical players, relationships, events and timings affecting
the future’ and ‘excessive focus’ which can be dangerous if it leads to rigidity
(Drew and Smith, 1995: 5).
The second aspect ‘will’ is similar to Hamel and Prahalad’s (1989)
concept of ‘strength of strategic intent’ which refers to an inclination to set
‘stretch’ targets and face up to challenges. Will creates a ‘winners’ culture
because it is ‘influenced by strength and styles of leadership throughout the
organization, not just at the top by generating self-confidence and a desire to
succeed’ but it requires ‘emotional commitment and high energy levels’ which
may result from internal tensions ‘evoked by dissatisfaction with the status
quo’ leading to a desire to ‘unfreeze’ (Drew and Smith, 1995: 5).
The third element is ‘capability’ which, although influenced by stake-
holder interests and preferences which themselves may exert critical con-
straints, refers to: (a) specific learned competences that are related to the
organization’s current situation; and (b) the ability and freedom to take
action. Capability may be limited by the dynamics of the context such as

power and ownership.
The point here is that change requires awareness of key learning pro-
cesses which include:
1 benchmarking (which is described as a process of learning from other
firms in the same or related industries);
2 action learning through teamwork and through executive development
programmes resulting in learning-by-doing;
3 an organizational climate ‘which tolerates failures associated with
greater learning and experimentation’ and displays openness and trust
through teamwork;
4 a commitment to support continuous learning;
5 creative planning techniques, ‘such as scenarios, visualization and inter-
active planning . . . which can stimulate strategic thinking and faster
learning’ (Drew and Smith, 1995: 6).
CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to illustrate the role of the change agent in
Strategic Human Resource Development through a series of case studies.
These examples reflect the subtlety of the role required by internal change
agents. Examples of managing change through each of the four models
(machine, organism, drama, discourse) carry their own set of boundary rules
related to defining the task, maintaining equilibrium, managing the drama
and negotiating the discourse. As Figure 6.1 indicates, the culture of the
organization is critical to how each of these models will be used by change
agents. Thus, power, politics and decision-making, motivation, leadership,
role conflict and stress will all be related to how well the different types of
intervention are managed. It has also become apparent that the management
of change has not only become an activity for managers, it requires a co-
ordinating role for the Strategic Human Resource Development change agent
(or internal consultant). It has also become apparent that change today deals
with processual issues and requires awareness of organizational learning. The
learning organization is effectively the flexible solution to the problem of
change because it seeks to promote continuous learning and develop the
potential of all employees. In addition, it seeks to integrate the individual’s
learning with that of the organization.
FURTHER READING
Useful texts on learning are Argyris (1997), and Easterby-Smith et al. (1999).
Two useful text on change agent practice are Gilley et al. (2001a) and Gilley
et al. (2001b).
7
Conclusion
Business gurus and consultants have merely interpreted the world, the point
is to change it. This book is written for managers as change agents who wish
to understand the frameworks and practical applications for a new Strategic
Human Resource Development. The word ‘strategy’ in SHRD incorporates
the underpinning knowledge of three domains – Organizational Develop-
ment, Human Resource Development and Strategic Management. To that
end, this book attempts to provide a better understanding of the concepts
and ideas that influence contemporary SHRD practice. The starting point is
the need to understand the limitations of the top-down formulas of change
management.
The ability to analyse and diagnose change depends upon a complex
mix of knowledge, skill and experience. The balance between these three
elements is critical. Knowledge applied without skill and experience leads to
complacency. Skill without knowledge and experience leads to frustration
when things fail to work out as expected. Experience without knowledge or
skill leads to a myopic sense of sublime detachment and self-importance.
There are two implications for organizations. First, is the requirement that
organizations create management development programmes to facilitate the
acquisition of change skills. Second, is the need for change agents to develop
sensitivity to the dynamics of process in order to deliver meaningful services
and products to customers or clients.
The knowledge and sensitivity encouraged by this book seek to enhance
the abilities of managers as observers, communicators, and assimilators of
knowledge. Strategic Human Resource Development should therefore be
regarded as a form of craft knowledge that enables managers to develop an
authoritative understanding of change processes. The ability to facilitate pro-
active change is, above all else, the distinguishing characteristic of the SHRD
change agent.
SHRD craft knowledge requires the change agent to become competent
at processing information. This craft knowledge requires acute powers of
perception and an ability to recognize critical issues and problems confront-
ing organizations. For example, Chapter 1 introduced Blake and Mouton’s
(1972) concern to understand the motives and ethics behind different

intervention strategies. Furthermore, in Chapter 5, it was argued that an
effective change agent required an ability to identify a course of action
through root metaphors intended to guide the focus of the intervention. In
Chapter 6 we discover what it is to become a change agent and how each of
the root metaphors inform the change agent role as mentor, critical thinker,
strategist, interpreter, communicator and, above all, as co-worker.
The skills of the change agent will be shaped by experience, on the one
hand, and by conceptual schemes on the other. Finding the right balance
between each is rather like equating rules with hedges, as Thomas Hobbes
did in the seventeenth century when he suggested that hedges exist not to
constrain people but to guide them in their way so they will not get lost in the
wilderness. When the rules become moribund, however, they need to be
challenged by new ideas and imaginative symbolic constructs. An example of
this was ‘The graveyard of ambition’ case study illustrated in Chapter 6. The
ability to understand the social dynamics of change, however, requires
awareness of organizational culture as a concept that is dynamic and fluid,
except, of course, in certain circumstances where conformity to a well-
defined norm is itself a virtue.
The processes by which we build pictures of the world from subjective
experience or from objective maps require an ability to visualize a pattern
that is not always immediately obvious to others. The change agent operates
with experimental instruments often transforming the subjective thinking of
others. A word of caution is recommended when using the word subjective.
To call organizational knowledge subjective is to argue that it is knowledge
performed by a knowing subject who is informed by historical and con-
textual circumstances but seeks ways to transform them.
It is not enough to simply have technical expertise in, for example,
accountancy, retail marketing, or electronic design. The reflective practitioner
needs to think about change as a long and complex series of processes.
It would be useful to conclude with a few words on the nature of
change. In one sense, change can be regarded as flux. That is, as a regular but
constantly changing pattern of ideas and actions performed by people in
organizations. However, for practical purposes it is useful to think about
change as comprised of human actions that transform the status quo.
There is a sense in which we can also regard change as either reactive or
pro-active. Reactive change carries its own set of dynamics which we can
define as radical in the sense that they seek to totally transform an organiza-
tion. This can happen with mergers or take-overs or when a new chief
executive attempts to re-invent an entire organization. Chapter 2, for exam-
ple, illustrated six strategies that became central to the development of
organizational efficiency in the twentieth century and were regarded as
precursors to our understanding of the management of change in the twenty-
first century. For the purpose of this book, however, we have focused on
incremental change which is much more positive and less confrontational,
Conclusion  177
and is driven by internal actions performed on an organization through

volition and methodical enquiry.
Pro-active change is concerned with the act of transforming products or
services by focusing on the key processes. It proceeds as a succession of
events that modify or replace previous patterns of activity in temporal
sequences. That is, as a series of short-term, medium-term and long-term
transformations that are marked by calendar time. Finally, it was also noted
in Chapter 4 that Strategic Human Resource Development practitioners need
to understand three things. First, they need to understand the complexity of
change management. Second, that being a change agent is a role of facilita-
tion and not a training role. Third, that they are required to promote a more
enlightened, ethical and skills-focused change management that puts human
resources back where they belong – at the top of the change agenda.
Ultimately, the skills of the change agent will depend on the ability to apply
the craft knowledge in order to gain the ‘conceptual leverage’ illustrated by
Chapter 6. Such people do manage to go beyond interpretation and trans-
form the world for the better.
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Index
Ackers, H.P. 47, 61 Blauner, R. 19, 49

action learning 177 Blumberg, P. 47
action research 94 Boddy, D. 125, 126
adhocracy 43 Boisot, M. 115
advocating 149, 170, 171 Boje, D.M. 58, 79, 90
Albrecht, K. 6 Boland, R.J. 108, 119
alienation 15, 16–18, 49, 58 Bolman, L.G. 71, 90, 124, 144
Alpander, G.G. 100 Bond, W. 56
Alvesson, M. 24, 25, 30, 37 Bounds, G. 57, 61
ambiguity 133 Bourgeois, W.V. 136
ambiguous learning 176 Bowen, D.E. 48
Andrews, P.H. 48 Bowles, M.L. 33
anomie 19 Boyce, M.E. 28
Appelbaum, S.H. 175 BPR see Business Process Reengineering
Argyris, C. 6, 15, 100, 173, 174, 175, 178 Braverman, H. 14
articulation 145 British Standards Institute 53
Ashby, W.R. 173 British Telecom 52
audience learning 176 Brown, A. 83
Austin, J.L. 43, 46, 149 Brown, R.K. 47
Buchanan, D. 125, 126
Bamforth, K.W. 11, 132
bullying 87–8
Band, D.C. 49
bureaucracy 42
Barrington, H. 106
Burell, G. 23
Barry, D. 36
Burgundy, J. de 123
Barter, R.F. 45
Burke, K.A. 134
Bate, P. 96
Burke, W. 48
Beckhard, R. 7, 22, 37
Burnes, B. 102, 103
Bedeian, A.G. 176
Burns, T. 102, 109, 141
Beer, M. 84
Burrell, D. 136
Beetham, D. 42
business idea 171–3
Behaviourism 6, 9, 12–13, 138
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) 39, 55–7,
Bell, C.H. 7, 83, 97
93, 101, 123
benchmarking 177
business strategy 115
Benne, K.D. 150
Bennis, W. 6, 42 Calas, M.B. 32
Beyer, J.M. 84 Cameron, K.S. 50
Biggart, N.W. 18 Canney Davison, S. 60
Bion, W.R. 132 capability 177
Black, M. 134 capitalism 108
Blake, R.B. 28, 151, 179 Carnall, C. 125, 126
Blau, P.M. 61 Casey, C. 145
Cassirer, E. 134 Deal, T.E. 64, 70, 71, 78, 84, 90, 124, 144
change 180–1 decision-making 55
agents of 124–8, 139–40, 153 deconstruction 34
culture change 82, 84–5 deep play 81
events or processes 29–34 Deetz, S. 24, 37
intervention strategies 28–9 defensive reasoning 173
learning processes 174–7 delayering 50
management 40, 56 Derrida, J. 34
SHRD emergence 91–118 Despres, C. 109
Chelsom, J.V. 98 development 106
Cheng, C. 104 diagnosis 122, 128–32
Child, John 111 Dickson, W.J. 15, 19
Chin, R. 150 DiPadova, L.M. 42
Chomsky, Noam 13 discourse 78–81, 134, 146–50, 170–3
Church, A.H. 97, 98, 106, 119 discrimination 87–9
Clark, T. 111, 124 Doherty, N. 52
Clegg, R.S. 41 Donnellon, A. 60
clients 126–8 downsizing 39, 49–52, 123
Clutterbuck, D. 43 drama metaphor 143–6, 167
Coates, G. 33 dramaturgical analysis 71
collaborative action 94 Drew, S. 59
Collins, D. 32, 33, 46 Drew, S.A.W. 49, 51, 176, 177
communication 65, 156 Drucker, P. 43, 109
complexity 17, 133 Dunn, S. 105
compliance 42 Dunphy, D.
conceptual leverage 134, 152–3 Durkheim, Emile 10, 65–6
Conger, J.A. 48 Dyck, B. 112
connoisseurship 133 dynamic codes 73–5
constructivism 135
contingency approach 109, 110 Easterby-Smith, M. 178
conventional codes 73–5 Eco, Umberto 74, 134
conversation 149 Edmonstone, J. 99, 100, 101, 119, 122
corporate culture 82 education 106
Coulson-Thomas, C. 59 Elliott, D. 87
counter-culture 70 emergent change 102
Crainer, S. 43 emergent strategy 115
critical incidents 159 employer/employee relationship 46–7
critical theory 6, 23–36 empowerment 7
Cronen, V.E. 79 issues 33, 45–6, 61
cultural codes 73–8 planned strategies 39, 46–9, 58
cultural norms 69 enquiry 135
culture 62–90, 96–7, 177 Enron 6, 61
culture management 64 ethical issues 97, 180
Cummings, T.G. 25, 59, 94, 97, 119, 125, 128, Etzioni, A. 40, 48, 61
129, 151 Excellence Movement 39, 41, 42–6, 50,
customer satisfaction 156 60–1, 81
customs 69 expert systems 141
explanatory metaphors 136
D’Annunzio-Green, N. 84 explicit codes 75
data 122, 132–50
data collection 83 Farace, R.V. 79
Davenport, T.H. 61 Fayol, H. 15
Davidson, K.M. 51 feedback 8
Davis, S. 103 Felts, A.A. 42
Dawson, P. 102, 119 Fisher, D. 149, 170
de Rijk, R.N. 106 fitness for purpose 53
Deadrick, D.L. 87, 89 Fitzgerald, T.H. 82
Deakins, E. 61 Fitzgibbons, 34, 35, 58
Index  207
flexibility 50 human resource management (HRM) 105–6

flexible specialization 109, 111 Humphries, M. 30
focus 177 Huse, E.F. 25, 94, 97, 125, 128, 129
Ford, J.D. 149 Huy, Q.N. 142, 150
Ford, L.W. 149
Fordism 5, 6, 13–14, 42, 45, 111 illustrating 149, 170, 171
framing 149, 170 independent learning 154
French, W.L. 7, 83, 97 individual learning 175
Frohman, A. 54 industrial psychology 6, 12–13
Fromm, Eric 19 Industrial Training Act (1964) 107
Frosdick, S. 87 information 99
functional analysis 65–70 innovation 45
functional fit 70 Inns, D. 95
functionalism 6, 9–12 inputs 142
inquiring 149, 170, 171
Gagliardi, P. 84 inter-relationships 162–6
Gallessich, J. 123 internal consultants 160–2
Gantt, H.L. 15 interpretive approach 70–3
Garavan, T.N. 106, 107, 109 intervention strategies 7, 25–9
Garfinkel, H. 145 interventionist metaphors 136
Garvin, D.A. 98, 176 interventions 98–9, 130, 173
Geertz, Clifford 72, 81 intrapersonal analysis 130
George Hotel case study 155–60 intrapreneurship 115
Gilbreth, F.B. 15 Investors in People 101
Gilley, J.W. 178 Isabella, L.A. 84
globalization 34–5, 106
Goffman, Erving 71, 80, 143 Jacques, R. 30, 32
Goodman, P.S. 59 Jaeger, A.M. 64, 81, 97
Grant, D. 105 Jakobson, R. 134
Granville, D. 98 Japanization 64, 81
Greiner, L.E. 97 Jaques, E. 132
Grice, S. 30 Jeffcutt, P. 64
Grieves, J. 145 Johnson, G. 87, 134
Griggs, W.H. 59 Johnston, W.J. 49
Guimaraes, T. 56 Jos, P.H. 42
Hackman, J.R. 60 Kanter, R.M. 43, 50

Halle, M. 134 Keenoy, T. 33
Hamel, G. 114, 125, 177 Kennedy, A.A. 64, 70, 78, 84
Hamlin, R.G. 37, 119, 151 Klein, M. 132
Hammer, M. 55 knowing 133
Handy, Charles 75, 77, 90, 175 knowledge 132–50
Harrison, M.I. 151 knowledge management 8
Harrison, R. 6, 7, 22, 28, 29, 77, 90, 107, 129, Koestler, A. 25, 134
130, 158 Kolb, D. 7, 54, 175
Havergal, M. 101, 119, 122 Koonce, R. 51
healthcare 101 Kuhn, T.S. 25, 134
Herschel, R.T. 48
Hertzberg, R. 15 labour process approach 109, 110
Hickman, C.R. 64, 65 Lacan, J. 134
Hiltrop, J.M. 109 language 24, 77, 79
Höpfl, H. 87 Lash, S. 105
HRD see Human Resource Development Lawler, E.E. 48, 60
HRM see human resource management Lawrence, E.R. 6
Human Relations School 47 leadership 24, 46
human relations theory 132 lean production systems 98
Human Resource Development (HRD) 8, learning
106–8 change processes 100, 112–14, 174–7
learning contd Morgan, G. 10, 23, 25, 78, 95, 101, 124,
HRD effects 8, 94, 106–7 134, 175
organizational 107, 174, 175–6 motivation 47, 48, 180
work-based 117 Mouton, J.S. 28, 151, 179
learning organization 176–7 Murgatroyd, S.J. 11, 21, 77
Leitch, C. 107 mystery customers 158
Lewin, J.E. 132
Lewin, Kurt 21, 49, 84, 94, 119 Nadler, L. 107
Likert, R. 48 Nadler, Z. 107
Lim, B. 64 National Health Service 99, 160–2
line managers 115 National Training Award 101
linguistic competence 145 neo-Taylorism 58
Lippitt, R. 54 Nijhof, W.J. 106
logical consistency 145 Nwankwo, S. 94
Lorange, P. 174
Lorsch, J.W. 6 Oakland, J.S. 58
Lundberg, C.C. 84, 123, 151 objective realism 135
O’Connell Davison, J. 50, 64
McClelland, D.C. 48 OD see Organizational Development
McCourt, W. 138 Oldham, G.R. 60
McGoldrick, J. 107 Olsen, J.P. 176
McGregor, D. 15, 48 organismic metaphor 142–3, 173
machine metaphor 138–42, 173 Organizational Development (OD) 6–8, 15,
Machine Products case study 162–6 54, 97
McHugh, D. 36 organizational features
McHugh, M. 13, 18, 48, 51, 64 analysis 20–3, 24, 79–80
McKinley, W. 49 behaviour 17
McKinsey 7-S Framework 43, 44 cultures 81–9, 94
McLean, G.N. 104, 106, 119 design 39
McLoughlin, I. 111 ideologies 77
McMahan, G.C. 106 knowledge 180
mafia model 51 learning 107, 174, 175–6
Makgill, H.H. 61 organizations 96
management consultants 32, 122–4, 126–8 Ortony, A. 134
managerial leadership 42 Ouchi, W.G. 64, 81, 97
Manz, C.C. 60 outputs 142
March, J.G. 72, 176 over dependence 154, 155
Marconi 6, 61
Margulies, N. 97 Pacanowsky, M. 48
Marks, M.L. 51, 123 Page, Charles 41
Marshak, R.J. 95, 146 Parsons, Talcott 10, 142
Marshall, C.C. 59 participation 33
Marsick, V.J. 176 Pateman, C. 33
Maslow, A.H. 10, 15, 47 Pearce, W.B. 79
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 10, 11 Pedler, M. 7, 176
Mathews, B.P. 145 Pepper, S.C. 134
Mayer, J.P. 17 performance 143
Mayo, G. 47, 52 performance indicators 142
Meek, V.L. 82 persona 143
Merton, Robert 15, 16, 66, 68 personality tests 13
metaphoric codes 75–8 personality types 16
metaphors 25, 45, 71, 79, 95, 105, 134–8 Peters, Tom 42, 43, 44, 46, 61, 64, 70, 81,
Metcalf, H.C. 15 84, 90, 94
Miller, E. 11, 131, 132 Pettigrew, A. 21, 94, 102, 119
Mills, A.J. 21, 77 Pfeffer, J. 100
Mintzberg, H. 115, 119 Pinder, C.C. 136
models 102 politics 94
modernity 6, 16–18 Porter, M. 112
Index  209
positivism 32, 135 Simon, H.A. 71

Potter, C.C. 94 Sims, H.P. 60
power 42, 48 skills 125
practitioners 117–18 Skinner, B. F. 12, 138
Prahalad, C.K. 114, 125, 177 Smircich, L. 23, 32, 124
processual change 102 Smith, D. 87
psychodynamics 131–2 Smith, K.K. 104
Smith, P.A.C. 176, 177
quality 53 social contract 77
quality circles 59 social knowing 133
quality management 53–4 socio-technical systems 131–2
Quality of Working Life 47 speech acts 80, 149
Spencer, L.M. 125
Raia, A. 97 Spencer, S.M. 125
Rappaport, J. 49 Stace, D. 84
rationality 17 Stacey, R.D. 175
Ravetz, J.R. 25, 134 staging 143
rebellion 68 stakeholders 94
Reed, M. 19, 37 Stalker, G.M. 102, 109, 141
reflection 33 standardization 14
Reichart, W. 175 Starbuck, W.H. 108
Reid, M. 106 static codes 75
relationships 102, 126, 132 statistical process control 53
reliability 141 Steadman, M. 94
responsibility 115 Stebbins, M.W. 51
retreatism 68 Steingard, D.S. 34, 35, 58
Revans, R. 94 Stewart, J. 107
Rice, A.K. 11 Strategic Management 120
Richardson, W. 86, 87, 94 strategic processes
rightsizing 50 change 112–14
ritualism 68 choice approach 110, 112
Robinson, W. 94 intent 115, 116
Roethlisberger, F.J. 15, 19 learning 153, 173–4
role-constrained learning 176 planning 115
roles 143–4 Strauss, A.L. 25, 134
root metaphors 138–42, 138–50, 180 stress 87–9
Rose, E. 105 structuralism 72
Sudnow, D. 23
Sacks, R.E. 134
superstitious learning 176
safety culture 85–7
supervision 18
Schall, M. 79
surface intervention 158
Schatzman, L. 25, 134
survivor guilt 51
Schegloff, E. 145
Swanson, R.A. 106, 119
Schein, E.H. 6, 30, 84, 126, 127, 128
Symbolic Interactionism 71–2
Scholes, K. 87
systems approach 11
Schön, D. 174, 175
systems theory 132
Schwartz, H. 103
scientific management 9, 13–14, 140 T-groups 21, 57
Searle, J. 80, 149 Taoism 104
self-managed teams 59 Taylor, F.W. 15, 140
semiotics 72–3 Taylorism 5, 13–14
Senge, P. 7, 175, 176 TBM see time-based management
Sexton, C. 58, 59 team development 7
Shirom, A. 151 teamwork 39, 57–60, 143
Shrivastava, P. 174 technology 10, 18–20, 110
Silva, M.A. 64, 65 Tenkasi, R.V. 108, 119
Silver, J. 64 Thomas, K. 49
Silverman, David 111 Thompson, P. 13, 18, 48, 50, 64
time-based management (TBM) 123 Waclawski, J. 97

Toffler, A. 42 Walton, A.E. 83
Tomasko, R.M. 51 Waterman, R.H. 42, 43, 61, 64, 70, 81, 84, 90
Total Quality Management (TQM) 39, 52–5, Waters, J.A. 115, 119
93, 98, 123, 142 Watkins, K.E. 176
training 94, 106, 107, 117, 141, 158 Watson, S. 34, 84
transparency 55 WBL see work-based learning
Trice, H.M. 84 Weber, Max 17, 41, 46, 61
Trist, E.L. 11, 132 Weick, K. 124, 141
tropes 79 Werr, A. 100, 123
Tsoukas, H. 25, 78, 79, 90, 95, 136 Wheatley, M. 104
turbulence 114 Whipp, R. 102
Turner, A.N. 25 White, M. 36
Turner, B.A. 89, 133, 134 White, R.F. 30, 32
Tustin, C.M. 49 will 177
Tylor, Edward 65 Willmott, H. 30
Winsor, R.D. 58
Urry, J. 105 Wittgenstein, L. 134, 136
Urwick, L. 15 Woodall, J. 82, 83, 90
work-based learning (WBL) 117
workplace harassment 85, 87–9
Vaill, P.B. 175
Worley, C.G. 119, 151
values 25, 69, 94, 97
Velthouse, B. 49 Zeffane, R. 52
Volvo 47, 57 Ziman, J. 135

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Strategic Human Resource Development

Strategic Human Resource Development

First published 2003

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

SAGE Publications Ltd

SAGE Publications Inc

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

ISBN 0 7619 4934 7

Library of Congress Control Number available

Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, Devon

1 The roots of strategic human resource development 5

2 Planned strategies for change: the evolution of strategic human resource

4 The emergence of strategic human resource development 91

5 Consultants, clients and change agents 120

6 Strategic human resource development interventions 151

The subject of Strategic Human Resource Development has emerged as the

reactive formulations of change management we have seen in the past 20

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1, ‘The Roots of Strategic Human Resource Development’, sets the

are viewed differently from various positions within the organization. By

Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis was a masterpiece of early twentieth-century

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD)

contributions to a ‘theory of practice’ (Harrison, 1970) through intervention

this new requirement. We saw the emergence, therefore, of a second theme:

This fascinating interpretation provides a neat linear account of the develop-

STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT

As organizations have restructured and downsized, employees increasingly

develop individuals and encourage management development. However, if

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL

Organizational Development emerged from three approaches to the study of

Functionalism and early industrial sociology

The sociological tradition came to view organizations as organisms in which

Revolution, the ‘organismic’ analogy came to prominence with the work of

The model of a biological organism encouraged a useful but rather one-sided

Pensions and health care plans

Psychological Salaries and wages

norms (attitudes and behaviours), values or beliefs. This may result in a

Behaviourism and the emergence of industrial

Industrial psychology emerged from the equally positivistic school of Beha-

In Skinner’s Behaviourism change results from selective reinforcement. This

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT, FORDISM AND THE

• the development of a true science of work;

THE PROBLEM OF CONTROL AND COMPLIANCE

In reality it is impossible to disentangle Organizational Development from

as a reaction to the ‘rational’, so-called scientific approaches to management.

The rational ‘scientific’ approaches to management that began at the begin-

Writers such as Merton (1968) suggested that such inadequacies

1 Bureaucratic structures demand reliability of response and strict

Thus, the characteristics that lead to efficiency may cause inefficiency in

Modernity and the study of alienation and anomie

Modernity is an unusual word because it defines a period of our industrial

utilitarian. Supervision was essentially formal and hierarchical. The state

The application of technology and the origins of

The roots of Organizational Development are located within the concepts of

worker’s advantage. From the point of view of the worker’s sentiments,

ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS AS CRITIQUE

Organizational Development absorbed the modernist assumptions of scien-

The Modern Post-modern FIGURE 1.3

Characterizing features: Characterizing features:

rationalist tradition that informed organizational effectiveness. From Amer-

action. Thus, OD activities are distinguished from a training course or a